{"id":5355,"date":"2012-06-05T15:15:59","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T19:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=5355"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:10:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T23:10:12","slug":"all-tech-is-dust-in-the-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=5355","title":{"rendered":"All tech is \u201cdust in the wind\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Getting students to stop texting during class can be a struggle for professors, but <strong>Andrew Carver<\/strong> encouraged his freshmen seminar class to engage in nonverbal communication\u2014albeit of a more antiquated form.<\/p>\n<p>Inspired by the book <em>The Victorian Internet<\/em>, which \u201c[makes] the case that telegraphs were transformative during [the late 1800s] similar to the way the Internet has changed our economy and society,\u201d Carver had students square off in a message-sending competition last semester using telegraphs they designed and built themselves.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/iStock_000014414505XSmall.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-5363\" title=\"iStock_000014414505XSmall\" src=\"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/iStock_000014414505XSmall.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\" \/><\/a>One team fashioned an optical device, the other an electrical one; both then attempted to transmit three messages\u2014the Victorian-themed tidings, \u201cRotary club meeting at ten\u201d and \u201cBuy two hay bales for six sterling,\u201d and the more modern yet equally ephemeral musing \u201cAll we are is dust in the wind\u201d\u2014from Paul Loser Hall to TCNJ Library. The optical team won when its transmission arrived 15 seconds before that of the electrical team.<\/p>\n<p>It took both telegraphs about five minutes to send the messages, a fact that proved to be an eye-opener for at least\u2028one student.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt gave me some real reverence for how far we\u2019ve developed as a society, technologically speaking,\u201d said <strong>Max \u2028Pollack<\/strong> of the electrical team. \u201cI spent several hours designing and building a machine whose sole function is to beep and light up, yet the circuits of today that comprise even something as simple as a wristwatch are infinitely more complex.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The competition tied into TCNJ\u2019s intellectual community theme, \u201cThe Pursuit of Innovation,\u201d and while it required 21st-Century students to build the equivalent of 19th-Century technology, participants were nonetheless challenged to be inventive and to \u201cpush themselves and their devices toward their \u2028performance limit,\u201d said Carver.<\/p>\n<p>They also learned a thing or two about the origins of the technology they now might take for granted. Said Carver: \u201cI think I heard one them say, \u2018I\u2019m glad we have cell phones.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Laura Herzog \u201912 contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Andrew Carver had his students trade texting for telegraphy during a lesson on innovation.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,53,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-june-2012","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}