Autobiography of a Tech User

I grew up in a large family in a cozy four-bedroom house.  Much of our spare time was spent in the basement where our colour tv was located. Two corners of the basement were devoted to storage. On occasion I would poke around the dusty shelves and boxes.  In one area an antique typerwriter sat. 

        Being a kid, I would play with the round keys, pushing them down and examining the letters.  I wondered why the letters were so random – it would be years before I learned about the QWERTY keyboard system. And the multi-coloured ribbon – it was so thin and delicate.  I would often try to type a letter for the sake of it but the ribbon was dry.  I’m happy for the memory – the nostalgia – of the typewriter.

And for a long time, it was the typewriter.  Then, in the 1980s, something new came to our home – Pac-Man. One of my first memories of technology is watching my brother play Pac Man when I was about 12 years old. I was fascinated by its colours, sounds and endless play.  I never became a fanatic – I simply watched my brother and his friends play. I also recall a Commodore 64 in our house for word processing. There seemed to be a craze – everyone we knew had one.  So it became a fixture in our house – like our colour tv.   

Then, I entered senior high school and I enrolled in Computers 10 (DIC 2A) with Mr. D. White. I didn’t excel as I wasn’t taken by the course content.  I don’t recall if I took another computer course again. One image that stays with me from that course is the floppy disk.  Also, I found my grade 10 report card. I scanned the first line – it’s hard to read but you can try to see that I didn’t do that well!  I received 50 in term 1, 60 in term 2 and 55 in term 3!  Somehow I received a 63 for my final mark.  It was a course about computer programming, spreadsheets and large format computers, current uses of society’s computers, ethics of computer information use.  A course more about computer science rather than data processing.  Looking back, it does sound like an interesting course.

I switched gears the following year – I enrolled in keyboarding.

I was happier there working on my typing speed and proficiency. It was a course I where I always felt a sense of satisfaction at the end of class.

Finishing high school and university, I moved on to start my degree in education. I continued to work on PCs and I printed many of my assignments on dot matrix printers.  Looking back technology seemed to stay the same… like it hit a plateau (from my perspective, of course).

Fast forward – 2012: I’ve seen a rapid change in technology in the last ten years.  The school I work at has four computer labs and our library has 32 computers. Our school is considering a large purchase of iPads for student learning. Suddenly there is a discussion of Learning Commons replacing the school library model. Here is a photo of my school library – busy with kids at work stations and at tables.

        I have four blogs on the go – two for UBC courses and one for my Humanities 8 class and another for my library monitors.  I use technology when I can – I have a smartboard in my classroom and I ask my students to use different kinds of software – prezi, pixton, smartboard – for assignments. I attend workshops on technology and education.  I’m open to change and I find there is never enough time to learn all the new software out there.

       Today I live in a 2 bedroom house but we have more technology than I had growing up. We have two televisions, two smartphones, one desktop computer, one laptop, one iPad, and two cordless phones.  Plus I have a facebook account and a twitter account.  And 2 email addresses.  I’m connected but sometimes I turn off my phone(s). We still have a land line but I can’t say how long we’ll have it. We hardly have any room for storage so we recycle old technology where we can.  Even now, I wish we had that antique typewriter – strictly for nostalgia purposes!