Making Connections

When I first thought about making connections throughout the course, it seemed very daunting.  There was so much material in the course, and I feel that personally my thoughts and perceptions changed so much throughout the course, that it can be difficult to make sense of them all.

When I look back on originally my thoughts on literacy and technology, I believed that literacy was the written word that we wrote.  And I viewed technology more as computers, tablets, smartphones, mostly computerized gadgets.  It is interesting to have what has been engrained in my mind by my school board and government as what is considered technology and what is literacy.  I’m sure that when I am asked in job interviews what technology I’m going to use in class, the last answer they would expect would be a pencil.  Or the idea of changing the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test to have computer literacy on it, would never cross EQAO’s mind.

It was interesting to go back in time when orality was prominent and writing wasn’t “invented”.  I think that we assume that writing is already something that has just been around forever, and never stop to think what it would be like without it.  I know that I look at students today and their go to is to look things up on the internet, whereas when I was younger I remember going to the library and looking for books and using the encyclopedias.  Never did it cross my mind that somewhere along the point these books were a new idea, and the printing press was created so that they could be made with ease, and people thought that new generations had no idea what life was like before that, since this was all I knew.

Showing how all these technologies evolved into the fast paced digital age we have today was a real eye opener.  It was interesting to see how items we take for granted were once these amazing technologies.  It was also interesting to see how with every technology there comes a fear, and negatives along with the positives.  It happens with every technology, although personally there are items that I couldn’t see a negative for.  For example, a book, or a pencil, or an overhead projector, but at the time these inventions were radical and changed how people communicated.

And that was something that fascinated me as well.  To really stop and think about how these inventions changed society, the education system and communication.  Every new invention did change it in some way, however, some were more subtle than others.  Because I have been raised in the digital age, and I’ve seen how much digital technology has changed communication, education, and society as a whole, I have never paused to think about the technology that came before it.  The changes we see now, must have been similar to how society felt with these previous changes.  It was eye opening to really put today’s modern technology into context of life altering changes in the past.