technology autobiography

Cynthia Britt
Professor Amy Berry
ED 504
16 January 2006
Spreading My “Techno” Wings
Yesterday evening, I was sitting at my kitchen table and thinking about what I might want to communicate to you through this technology autobiography. My fingers poised over the keyboard on my laptop, I looked up, and my introduction to this piece was set out as a tableau before me. My eighteen-year-old daughter, Katherine, was working on her laptop, downloading pictures from her digital camera to her facebook account. She is still on her winter break from college, and she occasionally would laugh or relay to me some story or item of news to catch me up on the lives of her friends. My seventeen-year-old son, Jonathan, was working on his e-school course (much despised Algebra II) with his laptop while downloading music to his IPOD, his head keeping time with the bass I could hear thumping through his earphones. The only person missing from the picture was my husband; I had just opened an e-mail he had sent from his Blackberry with “Elvis is back in Kentucky.” This let me know his plane had landed, and he was on his way home. Soon his laptop would join ours and make the last corner of the technological square on our kitchen table. This is a typical scenario for our 21st century family.
It is a cliché but undeniably true to say that things have changed since I was a child. I remember my best Christmas gift when I was nine-years-old was a tape recorder. I had to drop out of my freshman college journalism course because I didn’t have a typewriter to complete the assignments. With a family of six, my parents struggled financially, and I didn’t have the heart to ask them to buy one. My list of firsts includes a microwave, car phone, laser disks, and a VCR. I remember a surreal conversation I had with my children during which I tried to explain to them what a record player was. In high school, I learned to type on an electric typewriter—a wonderful leap from manuals. It seems like we have traveled light years since then.
I am not at the point where I take all the technology I benefit from for granted. I am deeply in love with the following: the fact that my car has both a cassette player and a CD player, so I can listen to books-on-tape; the fact that I have a laptop that weighs four pounds, and I have access to wireless internet at many places; the fact that I can take pictures and see them immediately on my digital camera, the fact that my children can reach me 24/7.
I am not at the point where I appreciate all the technology that invades my life. I resent the fact that my cell phone allows anyone and everyone to reach me 24/7. I had difficulty explaining to my summer business writing class why I would not give them my cell phone number. I have to routinely and kindly remind my husband that the world will not end if he doesn’t constantly check his e-mail through his Blackberry on weekends, days off, holidays, etc., especially while he is driving! I resent the fact that my internet account allows me to be contacted by people who entreat me to enlarge my penis, trim my figure, increase my sex-drive, and give me the privilege of sharing with them millions of dollars they legitimately should have but just can’t access without my help. Like most of you, I enjoy the benefits of technology without embracing all it brings with it—a type of technoschizophrenia. Also, maybe like some of you, I am intimidated by the accelerated pace of change in technology and how it influences my daily life.
However, there is one aspect of technology about which I don’t have mixed feelings—my desire to incorporate more use of technology in my classroom. I strongly feel that using technology in a purposeful and thoughtful way through my pedagogy and practice can improve the learning environment in the classroom, increase my student’s participation in their learning, and augment my instruction. However, I have quite a learning curve to accomplish those goals.
I have made some inroads to correct my digital fear and ignorance. I purposefully team taught the last two semesters with an instructor who uses technology in interesting and productive ways. With her help, my class developed surveys on Blackboard based on available on-line calendar programs, down-loaded the survey results into an excel database, and created scientific reports based on those results. We took pictures of the different stages as my students built Lego models so that they could use them in the instructions they were creating. We carried out usability studies on items as varied as cell phone camera, on-line pizza ordering interfaces, on-line mailing companies, and electric can openers vs. pop-top cans. My co-instructor utilizes many advanced features of Blackboard, and, therefore, I have become more Blackboard literate. The last semesters have been a bit of overload but the learning experience was well worth it.
The second way I hope to make further inroads in my understanding of and ability to use technology is through this class. I have nebulous, half-formed ideas about the things I would like technology to help me do—but my ideas are immature and still require confidence, information, and practice (years of that, I am sure) to begin to come to fruition.
Because I study rhetoric of science (which bleeds heavily into the rhetoric of technology), I am sometimes moved to view technological advances with suspicion and skepticism. As much as some aspects of “improvements” in science and technology have improved our culture they have also deformed it. However, I can’t help but have a sense of excitement and optimism about what technology can bring us through wise use and commendable motives. As a nurse, I have seen how medical care has been improved through new techniques and equipment and how that has directly influenced and improved the experiences of patients. I have enjoyed watching my son engage in a on-line video game play with people from all over the world. I have listened to the songs my daughter has composed through a music computer program that moved her easily through the composing process. And I have seen how my students respond to video messages that are delivered with power and give a visceral blow through the mixture of image, sound, and text.
I want to be a part of all that.