Interactivity #1

“Back when I was a young girl, if I wanted to hang out with some of my girl friends I had to go knock on their door and ask them to come outside” Whenever I think about technology and the changes that it has made to our culture, I think about my Grandmothers words. The generations have changed drastically since the time that my grandma was a young adult, and she makes sure to persistently remind me of this generation gap anytime I text or mention facebook affairs too often in front of her. Having these conversations with my grandma, or even my parents at times, makes me realize how reliant I am on technology; especially communication technology. I just recently lost my cell phone for approximately five days and I felt like I must have traveled to an unknown planet because of how lost and out of touch I felt. After enduring these five seemingly long days, I can’t imagine not having a phone at all. The three most influential technologies in my life presently are my blackberry, social networks such as facebook, and my laptop.

In reference to learning new information, the accessibility of these technologies has changed the way that I process and look for information. The instant access to the Internet that my blackberry or laptop gives me, makes it easy to look up anything and everything that I would ever need to know at any given time. Because of this however, I have become an impatient learner. I am less likely to want to read a textbook in search of the answer to a biology or history question, when I can simple type my question into a search engine. Because of the reliability that I now have on technology I don’t find myself sitting in the library late at night with my eyes blurring the lines of a textbook together to form an ink blot-like figure. Instead I am constantly searching the web and typing notes on a processor to study for my exams. There is a sort of authenticity that comes with sitting down for a long night in low light, attacking a difficult subject and drilling information into your mind. Because of this presence of authenticity alone, we know that technology has changed the way that we learn and think about learning.

In Olivia’s story, I felt myself being able to relate my uses of technology to hers. Unlike Olivia however, I do not feel as if I am exceptionally technology savvy. I am often to afraid to cause some sort of inter-web explosion with my attempts to make my own websites or download programs, leaving my computer useless. The young people in the videos seemed to be unafraid of the technology, and they fully embraced the opportunities that it provided them. I find myself often using facebook as a way to interact with my peers and family that I may not see every day. I enjoy staying updated on their lives and furthering my interpersonal relationships with all of them. Upon watching these videos, I felt that I could relate to the young people through the types of technology that they expressed were important to them. I was surprised however to see the youngest girl (of approximately ten years old) speaking about making websites and throwing herself into technology. I sometimes feel that my ability to utilize everything that the Internet and different technologies presents to me is limited. Seeing children as young as the little girl at the end of the “Learning to Change, Changing to Learn” video; navigating technology so freely, leads me to believe that as the decades continue to pass us by, younger generations will be fully reliant on and comfortable with every kind of technology. Technology has proven to be important for learning purposes, and it is therefore imperative that we not only make it accessible to our youth, but also additionally teach and promote technology and its advantages in our future classrooms.