Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

Before the age of computerisation, with desktop, laptop, iPad, and iPhone options, we had to make do with the only alternative available at the time.

Computerisation and Internet linkage make studying a breeze. Students are greatly assisted by devices and technology that we never had.

Back in the 1970s, apart from being an educator, I was also a student upgrading my qualifications through study. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, I was successful in earning four degrees. Included was a teachers Higher Certificate, a Diploma of Teaching Conversion, a Graduate Diploma in Intercultural Studies, and finally a Masters in Educational Studies.

The last of these qualifications was helped in part by the beginnings of computerisation, but the earlier studies were on a “go it alone” basis.

My studies were always by distance education. There was no nearby Post Office, certainly no Internet, and a requirement that all assignment projects be undertaken with the help, at best, of a typewriter and reliance upon the postal system of the day.

Neither in those days, were concessions and extensions of due dates on work as generously offered as now.

I recall undertaking my studies while at Warburton Ranges (1970, then 1974/75) the most remote community at that stage in Western Australia. We then transferred to the Northern Territory to Numbulwar where I was again involved in studies through the period 1976 to 1978.

Neither Warburton nor Numbulwar had telephone communication with the outside world. For urgent messages, we had to rely on VJY transmission, which was one up on pedal radio.

My process of studying was through books and other text references. Most of these I had to buy because they could not be borrowed in the locations where we worked. I would study the questions and then do my responses partly using an old Olivetti typewriter and partly by handwriting. I would cut and paste handwritten and typed text onto the pages and when I had finished these rough drafts, would send them to a lady in Perth Western Australia, who was an excellent typist and accurate interpreter of what I sent to her.

This lady was my lifeline and a very important connection between myself as an assignment writer and the institution that needed to receive the final copy of my papers.

After she typed the assignments, she would send the original to its Perth destination, and send me back a carbon copy of each assignment

These copies were often needed to help in preparing for the next assignment because they followed logically one from the other through the length of the course.

Such was the time and so unreliable with the mail that I always had to have my next assignment well and truly on the way before receiving the original that had been sent by my typist back, with the assessors comments.

When at Warburton, my studies were initially undertaken in a place where the lights and power went off at 9 o’clock at night after being switched on at five in the afternoon. This meant that I had to study by lantern and candlelight. One night, or rather in the early hours of the morning, I dozed off at my work went to sleep, knocked over a candle and the curtains caught on fire. I was lucky that the smoke woke my wife who aroused me and we were able to extinguish the fire before it took hold on the house.

Throughout the whole of my professional career I always made sure that my studies were not undertaken during work time. I felt that I wasn’t employed as an educator to work with others and using that time for my own personal benefit. So I was late at night and early in the morning Student. on one occasion when I had two quitemajor assignments due one on top of the other, I went for two full days from work to study from work to study without sleeping. (Now at the age of 77, I would like to try that on.)

Online study and computerisation did not really kick in until I had retired.I to Masters qualifications were completed after we arrived in Darwin and I went to lectures at the University.

In that context of course it was much easier than earlier in the peace – but computerisation along on the study was still in its infancy.

That is my story.