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Zoom Education Idea Is 100 Years Old
Everybody got used to the idea of mass zoom education calls during the pandemic - but did you know that the idea for it is over one century old?
(A typical mass zoom meeting)
In John Jones's Dollar, Harry Stephen Keeler gave a detailed description of how one educator might give a class to a group of students distributed all over the world:
ON the 201st day of the year 3214 A.D., the professor of history at the University of Terra, seated himself in front of the Visaphone and prepared to deliver the daily lecture to his class, the members of which resided in different portions of the earth.The instrument before which he seated himself was very like a great window sash, on account of the fact that there were three or four hundred frosted glass squares visible. In a space at the center, not occupied by any of these glass squares, was a dark oblong area and a ledge holding a piece of chalk. And above this area was a huge brass cylinder toward which the professor directed his subsequent remarks.
As though in answer to the summons, the frosted glass squares began, one by one, to show the faces and shoulders of a peculiar type of young men; young men with great bulging foreheads, bald, toothless, and wearing immense horn spectacles.
(Read more about the zoom call visa phone system)
Even better, when this story was reprinted in Amazing Stories in 1927, it was accompanied by this wonderful illustration:
(From Visaphone from 'John Jones Dollar' by Harry Stephen Keeler)
(Published in Amazing Stories in 1927)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/11/2023)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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