The role of technology has played an important part of my life from a very early age.
Originally from Squamish, British Columbia, I often felt like I was stuck between two worlds. While Squamish during the 90’s was primarily a resource and trades town, access to the Metropolis of Vancouver was a constant, and my family would journey to the city almost every other weekend to shop, visit family friends, or see the sights. Still, our distance from the city during the 90’s was apparent in the lack of a reliable highway. The Olympics of 2010 and the Provincially funded highway upgrades were unknown and non-issues, and as such, Squamish was often up to 5 years behind the rest of the world in the implementation and availability of new technology without making the journey South.
My first experiences were thus muted, limited to video games and the brief access I had to my mother’s for-work Personal Computer, both of which were shared amongst me and my two younger brothers. I found video games were a way of immersing myself into other worlds and exploring possibilities that beforehand had been unheard of, even in books and movies. While books and movies were static and passive, when using video games and the computer I was finally granted an active role in storytelling and was able to dictate failures, progress, and choices as I pleased, for better or worse. Even my failures such as deleting the wrong file or failing a platform jump helped teach me perseverance and multiple perspective through different approaches.
This culminated in an early growth of creativity and critical thought, which carried through in my education. I quickly found a love of writing as a teenager, and access to the PC came easier and more frequently, I was free to explore the wide world that the early internet offered in terms of possibility, as early as 6-7 years old. Luckily for me, at that point in time internet safety was largely a non-issue, as internet use was restricted to those with the training and access to both the computer and web, and my high reading and writing level allowed me to disguise my age and identity through the use of a handle. Of course, in the modern era it’s a wholly different beast.
That world was so far removed from reality that I found myself learning at an ever more rapid pace. I was easily able to progress my education at a speed far exceeding what I could reach in most aspects of the classroom, and quickly found myself connecting with others all across North America. Even today I still have friends in Quebec, North Dakota, The East Coast, and Toronto, all thanks to the accessibility that technology provided, all of whom were young pioneers to the possibilities the internet allowed. This sort of social interaction is only just now being explored in media a decade later, one such example being Homestuck, a web comic based on early 1980’s text adventures.
In my progress through Post-Secondary Education, I saw bits and pieces of technology implementation at a rudimentary stage, mostly in regards to the use of Powerpoint in group-presentations, but found there was a surprising lack of adoption in many aspects of education where even ease of facilitation is concerned. Things such as multi-modal project presentations with video, online organization of documents, and PDF access to material have been made so much easier with the rise of the 21st century, and my video game days have transitioned into the use of other technologies to make my every-day life easy.
Growing up in a rural location, if you had told me that in 2014 we would have portable phones capable of browsing the internet, sending and receiving e-mail, or navigating around with the help of elaborate map software capable of giving me a street view of a location, I would have quoted it as Science Fiction and thought it nice. But taking a step back, we need to realize that it exists and it’s being added to. We’re currently marketing electric cars that run on power originally generated by wind and water. We’re sending remote controlled robots to Mars, and we’re building prosthetic limbs that can feel and work just like a real hand.
We’re living in the future, and somebody forgot to tell us.
I’ve done a lot of soul searching in my life, living between Wilderness and Metropolis. And I’ve come to a personal philosophy that endorses living in a constantly progressive world. My reasoning for becoming a teacher is that I’ve realized I came to the party a little too late in my contribution and settled on how I wanted to change the world a little too late. I want to help Humanity continue to explore the stars, live sustainable lives, and explore their ultimate possibilities. The way I can do that now is to show students how far we’ve come in the past few decades, and give them options and inspirations to move forward into their own futures. I lived through the great technological change, and now I have to help both students and teachers understand the power they hold in the palms of their hands.
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