Last night I was able to attend a lecture with Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, that was a part of my Alma Mater’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
A Silicon Valley and philanthropist for more than 30 years, Steve Wozniak helped shape the modern computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products, the Apple I and II, and influenced the popular Macintosh.
Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he adopted the Los Gatos (California) School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment.
Wozniak is Chief Scientist for Fusion-io and author of the New York Times best-seller iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. He’s appeared on television shows Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, Dancing with the Stars and The Big Bang Theory.
Steve Wozniak was fun to listen to because he is an intelligent man and just never really seemed to want to stop talking. This was funny because he often forgot what the question was that he was even supposed to respond to. You could tell that he was super passionate about what he believed in and created. He started the conversation by telling us that it has always blown his mind that anybody would ever want to get an engineer’s autograph, yet here he is. #celebstatus
The moderator of this lecture asked Wozniak if he ever thought his product was going to fail, and he basically said of course. Steve Jobs was the marketer, he was the businessman that was trying to get Wozniak’s product out there. Their product, the Apple I and II, had it’s ups and downs within the company, and Wozniak was even turned down by Hewlett-Packard….5 times. According to Wozniak, the Apple II need to be able to do something and that something was play arcade games. We obviously know the ending to this story…that the computers turned out to be a success. Apple products are huge around the world. For a good article on the back story of Wozniak, click here.
Straying away from the Apple products and more toward Wozniak’s views on technology and education, he had the crowd in applause with many things that he stated. He believes that teaching is more about motivating students to do what they believe in and to encourage them to explore what they love. He said that STEM education, learning math and science (etc.), is more about giving them the building blocks to be creative. According to him, intelligence isn’t about whether you can get an A on a test of information that everybody around you knows, but rather what you can do with this information, what you can build and create with it. Education should be available for all, no matter what circumstances you may fall under. This nation is under an incredible amount of debt when it comes to education and he believes that this is not right at all. This is when the audience clapped and he responded by saying he wasn’t sure how that was going to go over with the crowd. This is an understandable response from him considering that he was talking at a university where a good percentage of the crowd, including me, is under an incredible amount of debt due to education. I agree with him 100% on this issue because I am the kind of person who wants to keep learning and I would love to go back to school for everything and anything, but you can’t do that if you don’t have the money or if you’d rather not rack up an exponential amount of debt.
He transitioned into discussing education and technology together. He believes students would benefit greatly with personalized teachers. By this he meant something like a personalized tablet teacher for each student. Everybody learns differently and has different passions, so he was talking about the idea of something similar to Artificial Intelligence and education combined. The ‘teacher’ and student can grow together. Classrooms nowadays are utilizing technology more than they have, even when I was in school (and I’m only 25, wtf). He seemed to dislike the idea that students are forced to have the same standard education, thus believes a personalized teacher for each individual student would help students more with what they are passionate about. This is an interesting idea and I can almost get behind it, except what is going to happen to the actual human teachers out there in the world? They’ll possibly be out of a job.
He was asked whether he believes technology, especially where it is at now with social media and such, is positive or negative. Wozniak said that he thinks it is positive; of course there are positive and negative aspects to technology, as with basically everything, but he thinks what is out there is considered a positive outcome. As a millennial, I agree with this. Technology may seem like the devil to many people, but we have come a long way in the past century than anyone would have ever thought.
When his 90-minute lecture was coming to an end, he left it on a very positive note. He said that everyone should always try to better; try to be a better person than you were yesterday. He believes that you should always work with what you love, even if it means doing what you love on the side in order to make a decent income so that you are able to live properly.
So with those words, try to be better today than you were yesterday. Wake up refreshed and ready to dive into your day, but always remember that you can work toward something that you love no matter how big or small that something is.
Nine:Sixteen 