Written by David Lapakko<\/strong><\/p>\n Surprise, surprise–not that long ago, communication technology was quite different in our\u00a0department and on this campus. In the \u201880s and \u201890s, we had this amazing piece of machinery\u00a0called a VHS player. With it, we could see instructional videos in class and record student\u00a0presentations–how cool was that? But, this equipment had to be housed somewhere. 171 Foss, which is now a suite for the offices of our department faculty, was Augsburg\u2019s\u00a0A\/V headquarters for many years. If you wanted to show a video in class, you needed to\u00a0reserve a cart–a tall, gangly thing that had a large TV monitor on the top shelf and a VHS player\u00a0on the shelf underneath. These top-heavy metal behemoths were on wheels, and there were\u00a0perhaps a dozen of them.<\/p>\n Throughout the day, you\u2019d see A\/V student workers pushing these\u00a0carts all over campus to classrooms where they had been reserved. It didn\u2019t matter if there was\u00a0a blizzard or a thunderstorm; someone had to push them through the snow, across the streets,\u00a0and over the curbs. And, you counted yourself as fortunate to get one, because sometimes\u00a0they were all in use in particular time slots. Back then, if you wanted to record student presentations, you could go to the library and check out a camera. But there were not things\u00a0like mp4s, or online links, so if students wanted to see what they had done, they needed to get\u00a0the VHS tape and find a place to play it.<\/p>\n In the meantime, technology was revolutionizing faculty offices. Throughout most of the 20th\u00a0century, students would have to be very lucky to contact their professors. They could try them\u00a0during their posted office hours, or they could phone them, but if the person wasn\u2019t in, they\u00a0were pretty much sunk. But then, along came voicemail! Now we could leave recorded\u00a0messages for faculty and staff, 24\/7. Especially in the early \u201890s, voicemail was all the rage; my\u00a0goodness, you could program the phone to include all the phone extensions in your\u00a0department, and send them all a group voicemail message. Now, of course, we would send such a note via email, but that wasn\u2019t an option back then. Still, we felt quite privileged to have\u00a0such state of the art equipment–including overhead projectors in every classroom!<\/p>\n Next time: When \u201cworking adults\u201d roamed around campus by the hundreds–the glorious era<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 2) Written by David Lapakko Surprise, surprise–not that long ago, communication technology was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,2,8,12,88],"tags":[114,65,113],"class_list":["post-25598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication-studies","category-faculty","category-film","category-new-media","category-students","tag-campus-history","tag-david-lapakko","tag-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25598"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25612,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25598\/revisions\/25612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nof Weekend College.<\/strong><\/p>\n