Jess Kisner
Instructor: Jack Hennes
ENGL 191-17
04 September 2012
People
and Technology: Ever Changing...Ever Growing
“I’ll never get
this”, I sighed to myself as I leaned back in my blue plastic
computer lab chair. I was frustrated, about to give up; and it was
hot in there, almost too hot. As if the computers were radiating heat
out of the slits in the side that also made that obnoxious humming
nose. I was eight and learning how to type and navigate a computer
for one of the first times in my young life. But they weren’t
teaching us in any normal way. No, they covered our keyboards with
cloth. It was supposed to help us find the keys on the keyboard
without having to look. But we were eight, we slouched as far down in
our little plastic chairs as we could and always peeked when the
teacher turned her back.
We
never imagined how something so boring, tedious… and itchy, could
ever help us learn to type or be more efficient on a computer. At
that age we didn’t care either. What would we need the computer
for? All our homework was spelling sheets and solving math problems
on good old-fashioned paper. To us computers were something complex,
foreign. They were something that mostly the adults used and it
didn’t bother us, to me it felt as if we had no super important use
for them. They were in a sense, a luxury.
I
sat there in that sweltering computer lab, with that itchy, puke
green colored cloth covering my hands, gazing at the screen, but not
really seeing it. The cursor blinked over and over, daunting me. My
mind was somewhere else. I wanted to be outside in the crisp fall
air, on the tire swing at recess. I wanted to be at home, having a
snack with my mom while we sat in the kitchen talking. I wanted to be
down the street at my neighbor’s house on her trampoline in the
early fall sunshine. We would try to crunch the fallen leaves by
jumping on them as they would occasionally flutter down from the
treetops above. I wanted to be anywhere but stuck in front of this
computer.
Years
came and went as I passed through Elementary, Middle and High-School.
As the years started going by, I began spending more and more time in
many computer labs just like that first one. They eventually took the
cloths away, but many still hunted and pecked just as they had
before. Then everything began happening faster and faster as
technology quickly advanced in on us. Soon, we were doing homework on
the computer, taking quizzes and tests, and even using new learning
tools our teachers discovered. I also remember when the first smart
boards were moved in when I was in 7th grade. Not too many
embraced these new ideas and some even fought them, especially the
more traditional type of teachers. It continued this way for years
with new things being thrown at us all the time as we struggled to
follow and keep up with all the new technologies
Next
thing I know it’s the first week of my senior year in high-school
and I’m lined up with a hundred other kids in the library to get
our iPads. The way our technology has changed is astounding. Almost
no one knew how to use their iPad the day we got them, by the end of
the year we knew more about them than Apple itself. We could navigate
those things like no one’s business. We had come a long way from
hunting and pecking in elementary school. But now we had to learn a
whole new way of typing, Typing on the iPads was something many of us
had never done before but only a couple weeks later many of us were
experts. Some struggled more than others and never really got the
hang of it. It was a whole new and completely new experience for us.
It began to change the way we understood and composed “text”. We
typed papers on our iPads, printed from them, did in class activities
from them. The computer labs went by the wayside. A trip to the lab
was tedious for teachers in High-school when we could just use our
tablets to complete the task.
My
experiences writing using technology have changed so much since those
days with the keyboard covers and huge computers. I recently got my
own laptop and am already used to it. I have realized however, that
my thoughts seem to flow better when I can type. It is faster and
more efficient. If I am hand writing a paper I seem to lose focus and
forget my points easier. If I jot down my thoughts and ideas and an
outline on paper and then type it my ideas flow better and I don’t
forget things. It used to be the opposite though. It used to be that
hand-writing my papers was actually faster for me but as I became
better at typing, things reversed. My experiences have shaped even my
actual writing. My thoughts and ideas are more organized and put
together.
I
feel that those who say reading and writing on a computer is notably
different are correct. However, the ones who say reading on a
computer isn’t actually reading and writing, I think, are wrong.
Our day and age is different and things are constantly changing. We
need to be able to keep up with them and keep up with the times.
Adjust ourselves accordingly or we are going to fall behind. Keeping
up with all the new technologies may prove difficult but it will also
prove to be worth it.
