Technology Narrative

Laura Guill

English 605

Mabrito

September 9, 2010

Technology Narrative

    My earliest encounter with a computer would have to be the Allen Digital Organ at our church. My father was the organist, and he would take me with him to practice. My objective was to pull the stops at the appropriate moments and I was amazed at the way pressing keys could suddenly turn into triumphant trumpets!

    The first computer I ever used was an Apple II-e, and my memories of Number Munchers bring a smile to my face all these years later. Using the arrow keys, I navigated my Muncher around the grid, only eating the correct response to math questions, while avoiding the Troggles wandering the grid trying to eat my Muncher. I was extremely jealous of my classmates, because last year each family had been given an Apple II-e to take home as part of a grant to study the use of the computer in learning reinforcement. My family was not part of the program because I transferred from another elementary in the same district which did not receive the grant. Oregon Trail was the only other game that we played on those computers. Aside from these games, we mostly used the computer to print birthday banners on dot-matrix printers. My first grade teacher saw no value whatsoever in these "toys" and we spent most of our instructional time cutting and pasting manually with paper and paste. Do elementary students even know what paste is anymore—other than ctrl + P?

    By 1989, my teachers were starting to consider rudimentary computer instruction as necessary, if exotic. We learned how to make our computer into a glorified Lite-Brite by making pixilated images. Mine was a Christmas tree, and it took me three sessions to complete. I printed it, cut it out, and glued it on construction paper to hang on the tree with some yarn. We also would write our annual Young Writers Workshop books, first by hand, and then painstakingly and agonizingly typed using only index fingers on the computer and saved on a floppy 5¼" floppy. We then printed our text and physically pasted it into our self-illustrated books, which we were immensely proud of because of the closer resemblance to "real" books.

    In my middle school years, computers were for typing previously written work. We never composed on the computer itself; just as in elementary school, computers were finishing tools, not an instrument in revision. We printed out multiple copies and conducted peer editing with pens and paper, rather with the computer. Nine week long typing classes were a new option at this level, and we tapped out our "asdf asdf asdf" over and over; finally someone was teaching us how to do something other than poke the keys with two fingers. We also discovered that it was endlessly amusing to steal the tracking ball from the mouse.

    In high school, the requisite Keyboarding course was conducted with WordStar and we learned DOS commands. We were instructed to memorize details relating to paper positioning that were surely vital in the glory days of typewriters, but which are a complete waste of time now when a writer can merely select the type of document he/she is planning to compose and the program will set all these parameters effortlessly. We also experienced some of the "Computers are God" types of drill and kill grammar exercises in which we individually had to convince the computer that we did know where to put commas. Even though we found multiple incorrect answers in the program, my freshman English teacher insisted that the program was still better than us!

    Unfortunately, everything I learned in Keyboarding was obsolete by the following year by the introduction of Microsoft Windows and Word at my school. This transition was shockingly simple due to the WYSIWYG interface (I just learned the term "WYSIWYG" today from this website, so I had to use it). With Word, teachers seemed more willing to experiment with allowing the actual writing process and revision to take place on the computer. Although these strategies were employed only sparingly, my classmates and I quickly adopted them as far superior to reading each others' scrawls and having to cross out large portions of text or use arrows to change the position of a sentence on paper.

    My junior year of high school, the Internet arrived in a computer lab. Although there were three labs in the school, only one was connected to the Web. Teachers were terrified of the Internet and saw only the dangers and few of the benefits. Only my French teacher made regular use of the Cyber Lab, lovingly nicknamed the Cyber Bubble due to the windows on all four sides of the classroom. We were able to read Le Figaro, enjoy French cartoon strips, and find pictures of the places we read about in our textbooks. These excursions on the Internet were mostly for entertainment. Although we had work to turn in by the end of the class, the focus was much less on the academic than on the diverting.

    Also in high school, Power Point presentations ruled the earth. Students were asked to make them for all their classes. This was my first taste of the rhetorical properties of multimedia. Never before had I taken a color scheme, pictures from the Internet, and information from research to create a product that was more than what an alphabetic research report could be. I spent hours personalizing my Power Points to my topic and preferences. Unfortunately, the teachers did not seem to know how to instruct us on rhetorical strategies and often violated the medium themselves by creating slides filled with text and reading the text to us while we took notes. The transition was on the horizon, however. At home, I used Hotmail and ICQ to stay connected to friends and in college, AIM became the application every one used to keep in touch.

    I realize now that I experienced the transition to Web 2.0 between high school and college, because the focus of the Internet changed from something that you had to invest time in to find useful information to a resource to stay in touch with others. I didn't have to go down the hall to see what my friend was still working on her paper, because her AIM status told me what I needed to know. If I wanted to get a group together to do something, all I had to do was put up a message saying where and when and everyone would know. I'm lucky that I was in college at the time with the benefit of campus security, etc preventing the majority of creeps from accosting me after brazenly posting my exact whereabouts.

    As a teacher, my favorite technological tools includes ELMO, which at first appears to be merely a glorified overhead projector but is a very powerful tool for the teaching of writing. ELMO makes it possible to project writing without the use of transparencies and markers and it enables modeling and collaboration in a more complex way because of it. My students like to see me writing their assignments along with them, modeling my self-correction and revision as I go along. They make suggestions for alterations to my text, and they can see me processing what they said and incorporate those ideas into the sample. Then the students themselves follow suit.

    At my school, students are not allowed access to many of Web 2.0s resources, but teachers are. I often will pull up a YouTube video to create a tone, inform, prepare, or engage my students in a way that alphabetic texts simply cannot accomplish. Although I love technology and the tools that are available, I wish I knew more about them. My younger brother (born in 1984) knows far more than I do just because he had the advantage of three extra years in the Web 2.0 experience before graduating from college. I eagerly anticipate learning more about digital tools and pedagogy for digital literacy.