Haven’t sat down with Kat in couple years (she’s the nation’s leading tax recruiter, all the big companies and Big 4 hiring partners know her), but she wrote this entertaining and highly
descriptive story yesterday to her 100,000 tax folks worldwide that leverage her tax recruitment site.
“… What I shall never forget was the experience that summer day in 2007 in an old dilapidated building. There I was sitting in a wobbly old chair to the right side of a scholarly, forward thinking tax law Professor sitting in front of a computer that looked like the very first “Lisa” computer that Steve Jobs built. Although it was probably not that one, it sure looked like it! The old computer had loose wires hooked up to another old computer with a video fixture added to the mix of wires and computer equipment. I sat there next to Professor Byrnes and experienced my very first distance course with students from Asia, South Africa, Brazil, Europe, U.S. and some other countries. It was fascinating to observe him teaching his tax students online from multiple countries. The experience in this old building with old computers hooked together with loose wires in what appeared to look like an old scientist experiment had me thinking privately… ”
From when I started in 1994 until recently, technology and education had been totally disconnected, so much so that I had to build my own computers and servers from parts I scavenged from the computer lab discarded machines, like old Gateways and IBMs, because faculty administration would not budget for technology build out for a professor. Anyway – blast from the past that I thought may be interesting to anyone in tax education.
William Byrnes' Tax, Wealth, and Risk Intelligence 