People and Technology: Ever Changing...Ever Growing

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 7^th 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.