After I got fired, I went and took a masters degree.
Oh, haven't I done that? Oh well.
I had, even before I got my first teaching job, being interested in computers in education. Not just teaching about computers, but using computers to teach, or to assist the education process, or processes. I had gone to the world Conference on computers in education. I had been exposed to some interesting aspects of the use of computers in education. As one example, the use of a computer; an Apple ][+ computer, no less; to grade, and mark, and even to tutor, students in composition for a master's program in music. This was being done in 1981. It's rather depressing to note the sorry state of the use of computers in education now, forty years later, when such things were already being done, with very minimally capable machines, in comparison to what we have now, back then.
I had subscribed to a magazine called The Computing Teacher. It was produced by a fellow who ran a masters program, in computer education, at the University of Oregon. I well remember one of the editorials that he wrote, in one of the issues, which said that, regardless of your skill or background in computer technology, you had the jump on 95% of your colleagues, simply because you subscribed to this magazine, and were therefore more aware of what was going on in the field.
So, when I got fired, I drove down to Oregon and talked to him. I explained that I had enough money to take the program for a contiguous year. Could I finish the program, I asked, in one year? Yes, he said, that was doable.
So, I packed up my stuff, got an education visa, and drove down to the University of Oregon. After a couple of false starts I found a place to stay. I got registered for the first semester, which was the summer semester. There weren't enough courses in the program for me to fill enough credit hours to keep going and finish in one year, so I was taking some traditional information systems courses. For example, I registered for a course in database management. I learned an awful lot from that course. One of the things that I learned, by taking the course ( it wasn't actually taught in the course ), was that every program, regardless of what it is, is either involved with database management, or with numeric processing. Or with both. I still suggest to anyone, taking any program in any field of information technology, to take a course in database management. It is one of the fundamentals, the absolute fundamentals, of information systems and processing.
When I came to the end of the semester, I suddenly realized that I had been lied to. No further courses were going to be given in the computers in education program until the following summer. So I went to the manager of the program, laid out this problem, and asked what I was to do. He said that I could take whatever courses related to information technology I could get into.
I had, of course, no prerequisites for any of the standard information systems courses or computer technology. So I found any courses that were even dimly related to the field, went to the professors, and begged to get into the courses. None of the professors for the standard computer technology courses what allow me into their courses without the prerequisites. The only ones who would let me into their courses, were those who are teaching non-standard courses, in topics which they themselves loved, but which were not, strictly speaking, part of computer technology and information processing as it was then seen. Therefore, I could only take these rather oddball courses. I took a course on human factors engineering. I took a course, taught by a professor from the physics department, and intended primarily for engineering students, on microprocessor interfacing and machine language programming. I took courses on artificial intelligence programming, of various types. ( And there are many different types of artificial intelligence programming. )
I made it through, just by the skin of my teeth, and got my masters degree. I have a degree as a Master of Computer and Information Science Education. I use this to justify my filling in the "profession" field on government forms as an "Information Scientist."
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