The Last Lecture
Perspectives
Past
Present
Allen Schmidt
Future
Beginnings
1966
 First MATC D.P. graduates
 First programming
course at Whitewater
 FORTRAN language
 Punched cards, typewriter
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Average Cost of new house $14,200.00
Average Income per year $6,900.00
Gas per Gallon
32 cents
Average Cost of a new car $2,650.00
Perspective
31 years later, bought a first digital camera
 $499.99 (under capital budget)
 20 shots
 640 X 480 resolution
 Within 10 years, cameras better than film
 Film disappearing
 More memory than the mainframe!
MATC Beginnings
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Fall, 1979 (31 years ago)
Average Cost of new house
Average Income per year
Gas per Gallon
Average Monthly Rent
Sony Walkman
1979
$58,100.00
$17,500.00
.86
$ 280.00
$ 200.00
1966
$14,200.00
$6,900.00
.32
2010
Cars - $ 25,000 on average
 Google is 11 years old ($550 per share)
 Twitter is 4 years old
 Facebook has had more hits than Google
(March, 2010)
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1979: Downtown MATC
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Room 421 of what is now space
No cell phones, personal technology
Shared telephone
Room 422 had ceiling debris falling into it
Hot, blacktop roof
(held a class outside)
Advantage: State Street
(lunch at Rennebohm's)
IT Instructor Office: Room 421 (Currently does not exist)
Room 421
Coding
Listings
Convenient
Handout
Storage
(ladder
needed)
Paper Based
Coding
Sheets?
Room 421
First dollar
Professor
Walski
Whiteout
“Bookcase”
Project 5
Technology
Overhead projector
 Card punch
 UNIVAC mainframe
 2 MB memory
 8 hour turnaround time for students
 Focus on “desk checking”
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Now: Spring 2010: All apps from the
mainframe have been removed
Compared to…
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Punched cards
will travel
At Colorado Mountain College (1974 - 1979)
 Once a week turnaround
 Put card deck and keypunch instructions on a bus
to Glenwood Spring, got a listing back
Second year: System 3
 Taught RPG
Systems Analysis
Now: Currently
object-oriented
UML, Ajax and
other advanced
topics
 Then:
 Taught how to use
a card sorting
machine
 Batch processing
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Courses
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Then
 Assembler
 COBOL
 Fortran (DP Math Analysis 2 – Statistics)
 Basic (DP Math Analysis 2 – Statistics)
 Computer Concepts
 Principles of DP (taught to non-majors)
 COBOL and RPG in one course
 Computer concepts
Courses
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Now
 Object-Oriented Web languages
 Java
 .Net
 PHP
 HTML
 XML
 O-O Analysis and design
 Oracle
 AJAX
 iPhone App Development
DPMA & Social Events
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Very active chapter
Students (under the leadership of Mary Burns)
held a beer party in the downtown student union,
Scanlon Hall
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Spring Picnic was held at Vilas Park
 Packed with students
 Volunteers received T-shirts
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Now: Campus Cookout (the world is safer…)
Lectures
Used overhead projectors
 Evening classes went until 8 PM
 No in-class labs
 Systems analysis course did not have labs
 Taught in the Esplanade building across the
street
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Economic troubles
Now
 Difficult economic times
 High unemployment
 People need new skills
 Re-training older workers
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Economic troubles: Farming
Then
First floor of the old MATC Downtown (now space)
(If video does not play, click Farming Video link on Web site)
Grading System
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Now
Blackboard provides scores and grades on the Web
Then
We had a automated computer grading system
 Produced sorted reports
Feedback for students
 Grades were taped on the wall outside the office
 For “security” they omitted the name but were in name
order sequence
 Identified students by posted social security number
Distractions
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Students in 2010 are distracted by the Web
 Playing games
 Surfing the Web
 They get lower grades, or drop the course
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Tech-enabled multitasking: A time waste?
 About 28 percent of an office worker's time is lost
 65 million U.S. knowledge workers
 Average knowledge worker's salary: $21+/hour
 Interruptions cost the U.S. about $900 billion per year
 Out of a gross domestic product of about $14.5 trillion
Distractions
Then
 In the 1980s there were also distractions…
 Room 386 windows faced the Highway
51 drive-in movie theater
 During breaks, watch the movies
Personal Computers
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IBM PCs created in 1980
MATC got them in 1984 or so
Advanced: Had dual 5 ¼ inch floppies
No hard drive
Later…
 Hard drives
 Zip drives
 IBM’s OS/2
 Virtualization: OS/2 ran Windows 3.1
The impact of all this technological change…
Cyber Waste
3 billion units of consumer electronics will
potentially become scrap between 2003-2010
 300 million computers discarded by 2008
 Have enough mercury to poison the Great
Lakes 8 times over
 Pile of obsolete computers would make a 22
story mountain that covers the city of Los
Angeles
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Main Lecture: Data Warehouse
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Data is from multiple sources
Must have “data hygiene” getting the data to
conform to the warehouse
 The data is usually obtained from many
different sources
 Needs to be made uniform
Covers a large span of time
It is organized for queries :
 For efficient data retrieval
 Around subjects
 Data mining software searches for patterns and
trends that are not normally seen
Student Grade Data Warehouse
Personal Project: All students in my classes
 Data is from multiple sources
 Copied from mainframe
 Prior to 1986, scanned, keyed in
 After 2002, from Peoplesoft
 Data hygiene
 Sorted, check for multiple name spelling
 Change of name due to marriage, etc.
 Added gender
 Time span: 1979 - 2010
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Results
Number of students taught
 Number of class-students
 Number of classes taught
 Number passing with a specific grade
 Number of male/female
 Trends by year
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Quiz: How many total student in
classes (each student in a class)?
A. 3127
B. 3241
C. 3926
D. 4289
E. 6085
Number of Students
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Total class students (one student in one class)
 6085
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Unique students
 3733
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Most classes taken by a single student
 15 (Randall)
Courses
Without
Labs
Computer
Lab
Courses
Impact
of Y2K
Start of
Advising and
other activities
Courses Taught
Course Name
Systems Analysis
CICS
Programming 3
Advanced Website Development
Systems Design
DP Math 1
Programming 2
Access, Database
Computer Concepts
Principles of DP
Programming 1 Assembler
Website Development
DP Math 2 - Statistics
Online JavaScript
Job Search
Project Management
Count
1601
773
772
598
464
358
340
318
243
178
134
133
110
28
26
9
Quiz: Overall, what percent of
the students have been women?
A. 23%
B. 28%
C. 32%
D. 38%
E. 44%
By Gender
Gender
F
M
 Total
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Count
2560
3310
5870
Percent
43.6
56.4
Low Number
of IT Jobs
Results:
Results: Time
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Time spent correcting projects
 Assume 5 projects per class
 6085 X 5 =
30,425 projects corrected
Assume 12 minutes average per project
 6085 Students
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6085 X 5 X 12 =
365,100 minutes
6085
hours
761
8 hour days
4
academic years
(190 days/year)
Results: Time
Time spend lecturing
 31 Years
 16 weeks of lecture
 Average of 15 hours per week of lecture
 31 X 16 X 15 = 7440 hours
930 8 hour days
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Perspective
However, the focus is on students, each one
as a unique individual
 Each one with unique abilities and needs
 Watermelon
 Mom returning to college
 Cornrows
 Responsibilities of adult life
 Overwhelming at times
 Sacrificing a grade
 Jobs
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The future
What will things nay be like 31 years from now…
Change…
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The change of change is changing
 Health care
 Technology
 Education
 New devices
 New ways of doing things
Change
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It is said that 80% of jobs that current kindergarten
children will hold have not yet be invented
New social media degree at MATC
14 years ago, were these jobs available?
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Chief Evangelist
Virtual World Bureau Chief
Brand Champion
Senior Interface Hacker
Blogger
Online Audience Development Manager
Social Media Strategists
User Experience Analyst
Change
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Would these headlines make sense 5-10 years ago?
“Hackers silence tweets of devoted Twitter users”
“Twitter Execs Assuage Developer Fears at Chirp
Conference”
“How Twitter's Promoted Tweets Will Work”
“The 25 Best iPad Apps”
“Facebook Launches Revamped Safety Center”
Change
Amount of information is expected to double
every 72 hours in 2010
 Where will it go from here…
 It’s impossible to know all the available
information
 With more information, we become more
specialized
 Spend more time learning
 What we teach is more specialized
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Change
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Pattern of change
 Starts with “Wow, that’s amazing”
 Becomes a state-of-the-art feature
 Becomes an extra feature
 Becomes a ordinary feature
 Is commonplace
Change and Disruption
With our technology, disruption occurs
 Some beneficial, some not so beneficial
 Half of Americans expect newspapers to
become extinct
 Who is challenging who…
 IBM →Microsoft →Google →Facebook →
 What has Netflix done to video rental stores?
 GPS systems, location aware Web apps
 How will our world change in the next 31
years?
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Change
85% of Americans have high-speed internet
 Nearly 50% of Americans 12+ years have a
social networking profile (double that of 2
years ago)
 80% of 18-24 year old, have online profiles
 For the first time, Americans say that the
Internet is the most important medium
 Google considers Facebook the only serious
competition
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Change: Health Care
Prosthetic arms and legs under control of a
person’s brain
 Nanobots: tiny robotic devices that work
internally
 May eliminate many serious diseases in
10-15 years
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Health Care
Researchers have developed a cocktail of
ingredients that forestalls major aspects of
the aging process
 Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic
code of two of the most common cancers
 Could revolutionize cancer care
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Health Care
The Methuselah Foundation has launched a
new prize to advance life extension and
regenerative medicine
 The NewOrgan Prize will be given for
successfully constructing a whole new
organ – heart, kidney, lung, pancreas or
liver - from a patient's own cells
 Their goal is to achieve this medical
breakthrough within the next 10 years
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Health Care
Smart Pills Could Help Save 218,000 Lives
Each Year
 Seeking a way to confirm that patients have
taken their medication
 Added a tiny microchip and digestible
antenna to a standard pill capsule
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Health Care
New ORNL carbon composite, close to
Synthetic Human Nervous System
 Mimicking the human nervous system for
bionic applications
 Method developed at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory to process carbon nanotubes
 Ultimately, the goal is to duplicate the
function of a living system
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Improved health care: longer lives
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Current Cause of Death Cumulatively Eliminated Expected Age
None (death rate same at year 2000
80
10% of medically prevented conditions eliminated
88
50% of medically prevented conditions eliminated
151
90% of medically prevented conditions eliminated
512
99% of medically prevented conditions eliminated
1,110
99% of vehicular accidents eliminated
1,490
99% of violent deaths eliminated (homicide. . .)
2,420
99% of non-vehicular accidents eliminated
8,000
Technology
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Computer chip that can store an unprecedented
amount of data - enough to hold an entire library
 Magnetic nanodots that store one bit of
information on each nanodot
 Store over one billion pages of information in a
chip that is one square inch
By 2013 a supercomputer’s computation
capabilities will exceed that of the human brain
By 2049 (estimated), a $1,000 computer will exceed
the computing capabilities of the human race
Brain controlled computing
The headset as both a gaming device and as
an aid for the disabled
 $4 million grant from the US Army to study
synthetic telepathy
 Involves translating brain waves into
instructions for a computer
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Invisibility Cloak?
German scientists created a threedimensional "invisibility cloak" that can
hide objects by bending light waves
 Used photonic crystals to make an
invisibility device, or cloak
 Uses a class of materials called
metamaterials
 Not very big yet: used the cloak to conceal a
small bump on a gold surface
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Brain Backup
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Copy your brain to a computer?
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Swiss scientists and PIT Solution
Working on the Blue Brain Project
World's first comprehensive attempt to reverseengineer the mammalian brain
The $3 billion project is expected to be completed
by 2018
International project
 Swiss Federal Institute
 Involves several countries
 Ethics monitoring by UN bodies
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Brain Backup – Questions to Ask
Who will write the code for the backup?
 With backup, need a restore program
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Brain Backup – Questions to Ask
CRUD
CURD
All stored data has basic operations
 Create, Read, Update, Delete
 Creating the backup
 What about update???
 Will you be able to “tweak” the backup?
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Summary Thoughts
How do we manage all this change?
 Need for a balance in life
 Gives greater happiness
 Too much change, not enough time for
the things that matter most
 Mind has tremendous power
 Develop your mental capacity
 Think positively
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Summary Thoughts
Students have always been our focus at
MATC
 Treated as individuals with many demands
on their time
 They are treated as we and our loved ones
would like to be treated
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Summary Thoughts
We teach what is called agile development
 Focus is on some core concepts, one of
them being humility
 As a teacher, always learning
 From family
 From other faculty
 From graduates
 From students
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Closing: Regrets
Sunshine committee
 State called conference
 India sister college
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Closing: Suggestions For MATC
Faculty need time to upgrade curriculum
 Time to learn a new course
 Time to development new curriculum
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In Conclusion
Great colleagues
 A great place to work
 Always learning
 Great support staff
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Live fully
Live
 Love
 Love what you do, do what you love
 Take time to enjoy life
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