Whiteboards and chalkboards and smartboards, oh my.

In the lecture bowl in my alma mater's psyc building, we had those chalkboards on rails. The ones where you have three boards that you can write on, and when you're done with one, you push it up out of the way, and you have your tabula rasa. It was great during certain lectures because you could show progress over the course of a class; very helpful in classes like Stats or History and Systems.

I found out on Monday that they finally replaced them with whiteboards. And instead of two sets of three, they just have whiteboards screwed to the walls. I sighed softly, nostagically, because I haven't had a chance to write on a chalkboard in years. I miss the feel of caulk dust on my fingers, the smell of fresh chalk when a new box is opened...

Damn, I'm a nerd...

Chalkboards are slowly going extinct.

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I remember the first time I saw a whiteboard. It was in the lab section of my Intro to Computers class back in the fall of '88. When we walked into the lab I can remember noticing that there weren't any chalkboards, and I thought, "how weird is that? Classroom without boards...(in psychology, we call that a violation of the set schema). It bothered me that we were going to be in this lab without chalk boards; and then, the teacher came in, pulled out a marker and started writing on the freakin' wall! I went from a violation-of-a-set-schema to a what-the-flippin'-fuck situation!

It was amazing. At least I thought at the time.

For a long time, more and more whiteboards migrated into classrooms; they even replaced chalkboards in a few prof's offices in the psych building, as well as the smaller classrooms in the basement of the building.

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A few years back now, I was on the sister campus, and we were in a room where they had what I called at the time a 'whiteboard on steroids'. After plugging a cord into a computer, you could interact with the computer via the whiteboard. If you pushed a button on the side of the board, whatever you wrote on the board with a dry-erase marker would also be recorded on the computer! Flippin' amazing! I turned to my provost and said "I want one in my classroom!" We do have a smartboard on our campus now, but, it's in the room we typically use for meetings. I'd still like to use it, but, I can't fit 40 students into that room comfortably.

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I miss chalkboards. And I know quite a few of the profs over at my alma mater will miss the boards on slides. Dr. A. would use them with panache and flair, pausing at the dramatic moments and would flip that board to the top of the slides with a thunderous "BANG" and while we were still watching it, he'd be furiously writing on the next.

Now that's style.