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Technology

I teach English 9 honors class in a room where each student has a computer on his or her desk.  This experience has caused a fascinating change in thinking for me.  In fact, if I prioritize my time differently I could write a thousand blog entries all about going back into the classroom.  But for today I want to write about how I see technology differently than my students.

There is always a generational divide.  For some generations the divide was best defined by music and mores.  Now, there's another divide.

Imagine that the world of technology is like a backyard.  My generation has gotten to know that yard as each individual blade of grass popped up.  My first encounter with a computer was this dark screen that I typed commands into and eventually made the screen go from black to flashing colored letters that spelled my name in a very blocky way.  Years later I got to know WordPerfect and dot-matrix printers.  Then a dial-up internet that felt fast when it only took one minute to load access to a data-base for research. One year I learned a grade book program.  Another year I learned Power Point.  One thing at a time, one really long butt-numbing workshop after another.

My kids have a completely different experience, a totally different way of perceiving technology.  For them the grass (and the weeds) have always been there.  They haven't sat through any butt-numbing workshops at ALL and yet they know how to operate Word, Power Point, You Tube, websites, and more other programs than I can even imagine.  While my generation gets our shoulders all bunched up around our ears at the idea of learning a new app, the generation that follows us has already figured out where the bugs in the program reside.  They understand that if you click the wrong button, nothing blows up.  (Or it does blow up and isn't THAT cool?)

But what they don't know yet, is the difference between grass and weeds.  And that's where the two generations need to collide for Good.  We need them to teach us to just try things out, to dig and ask questions until we make things work and they need us to help them see what is worthy of attention in the cyber-world.

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