Tomorrow I start teaching my course on Religion and Popular Culture at Miami University. I am excited about teaching — and particularly about the course topic, religion and popular culture. This gives me an excuse to watch too much television and call it “work,” and I am all about that.

But consider this. The last courses I taught were at Barnard College/Columbia University in 1997. 1997!  We thought we were cool if we showed a VHS tape in class. Here’s what I remember from education in 1997:

• No one had a DVD player, or if they did, they didn’t use them to teach.

• No one had invented ratemyprofessors.com, that all-too-necessary website that evaluates professorial merit on the basis of “hotness,” among other factors. How did education ever proceed apace without this?

• No one tweeted during class about how boring your lectures were. They just sucked it up.

• PowerPoint was nowhere to be found in the classroom.

• Students didn’t expect to be able to contact their professors 24/7.
• A “blackboard‘ was a chalkboard with actual chalk, not a soup-to-nuts education website.

Clearly, a lot can change in just over a decade. What changes have you seen in education?