Hometown: Elmhurst, Illinois

When did you join UMRA? April 2024

What was your very first job? Cleaning floors (after hours) at a florist shop in Iowa City, Iowa.

What drew you to the University of Minnesota? Having worked for a computer camp for kids in 1979, I was hired on the St. Paul campus in 1985 to manage a computer lab for adult learners at the Earle Brown Center. The center was then administered by the Minnesota Extension Service. Later, it became part of the College of Continuing Education, and the building was renamed the Continuing Education and Conference Center. The center is now closed, as all courses are delivered online. 

What was your role when you retired from the U of M? I was a program director in the College of Continuing and Professional Studies. We developed and delivered non-credit courses and certificates for working professionals who needed to enhance their skill set as project managers, business analysts, scrum masters, and business process managers.

Do you have a favorite place on campus? The St. Paul Gym. I try to swim there every Monday through Friday.

You were the Computer Lab coordinator at the U of M from 1985 to 1999. That period of time spans the years when the Gopher information system was developed and launched at the U of M, and was then quickly eclipsed by the World Wide Web. That must have been an amazing time to be working in information technology. Please share a memory that still stands out in your mind from those days. 

When I first managed the lab in 1985, we had 20 IBM PCs (personal computers) that were not networked and had dual floppy disk drives. I purchased and installed 10 MB (yes, MB) hard drives. About a year later, we decided to network the lab to take advantage of the free antivirus software that the U was offering. We used Gopher to download the files. When hypertext and the World Wide Web arrived, everything changed. One day a grad student who managed the lab after hours showed me a website he had created for our conference center using pure HTML. He'd used a department marketing brochure as his model. The Web was so new at the time that the impact didn't really hit me right away. It was one of the first department websites on campus. It promoted our conference rooms, food service, and computer lab. You can still find remnants of the old website on the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.

Later, the University wanted to teach Java classes in the lab. We purchased removable hard drive enclosures that allowed us to quickly swap Windows hard drives with Linux drives. We could teach DOS/Windows apps during the day, and within half an hour reconfigure the PCs to run evening Java classes.

You have taught Excel classes through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), and have been a Minnesota Reading Corps tutor. How, in your experience, does teaching older adults compare to teaching children? 

The Excel class was a bit of an anomaly. It was hands-on, and the biggest challenge in teaching a hands-on Excel class to older adults is getting them comfortable navigating the spreadsheet using the keyboard, mouse, or keypad. It was frustrating to the students, who generally did not ask for assistance. Students who were already familiar with Excel did very well. I have better success when I teach the Introduction to Genealogy class, as this is largely lecture and discussion. The students are generally quiet, but do ask questions and make comments, which I encourage. I created a series of videos the students can watch at home to reinforce what I cover in class. Mostly procedural stuff like using Family Tree Maker or WorldCat.org to capture text and images from the web, and creating family history folders on your computer.

I taught reading in grades K through 3. The materials we used were all paper-based— phonics, word blending, reading short passages. The kids were a joy to work with, and I would have continued tutoring if it had been possible, but AmeriCorps only permitted tutors to work for four years. Tutoring was one-on-one for 20 minutes, so there was not the chaos sometimes found in a full classroom. Unlike OLLI classes, you actually see results with reading, especially since we did a lot of assessments.

You are the current acting president of the Minnesota Genealogical Society (MGS). What inspired you to become involved with exploring family history?

I've been researching my family history since the 1970s. MGS was a natural organization to join. Early on I acquired a lot of bad research habits, and the society helped me recognize my transgressions. I'm now much more focused on documenting my evidence. I'm also excited about the potential of AI to make searches faster and more accurate.

What is a fun fact about you that we might not know? I enjoy baking pies from scratch.

Editor’s note: To learn more about Mike Amidon’s experience exploring family history, watch the video recording of “The Bigamist and the Optimist,” his recent presentation for UMRA’s Family History Interest Group.