ETEC 540 Task 1

My name is Janice Roper, I’m now in my 7th MET course and along with the rest of the world, my family and I have experienced some significant, and hopefully temporary, changes to our daily lives recently.  We usually live in New Delhi, India, where my husband and I have worked at an international school for the last three years.  Our daughters are in grades 6 and 9.  For the “What’s in Your Bag” assignment I’ve included the contents of the backpack that I take to work daily and also use as a carry-on bag when I travel.

My backpack still has many of the items that would typically be there, since it hasn’t been used since we arrived in Canada in April.  I travel quite frequently, and some of the items in the bag reflect this.  Boarding passes and a hotel receipt are remnants of previous trips.  Gravol, sinus spray, backup earphones, tissues and Claritin are all items that I keep in my bag for flying.  Three different types of hand sanitizer are signs of the current Covid-19 era, the sanitizer and travel toilet paper in the Ziploc have always been in my bag when heading out in India.

The everyday items represented here are my laptop and sunglasses (which I have still been using daily).  Daily items that are missing from the bag (because they’re still in my apartment in Delhi) are my school ID and my travel mug.  Since I live on campus at school, I don’t have any daily commute, which is represented in the simplicity of my daily items.  I don’t need any keys, there is nothing that indicates running, tennis, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, or other pleasures that fill my time, since I can always just run home to change and pick up needed items.

Thinking of text technologies, my laptop is the obvious item that stands out.  I do a few different jobs at the school and work out of two different offices.  That is one of the reasons that I have made a conscious effort to go paperless and maintain almost all of my files and notes electronically.  The one crumpled yellow sticky note is the lone example of work notes that I might make manually, otherwise it’s all online.  This has been a big shift, since we were using paper files in Admissions when I started in my job, and it continues to be a challenge.  However, we were very happy that we had our new system in place with the closure of our school campus in March, since we shifted quite easily to remote Admissions work.

The business cards are also worth noting when considering text technologies.  I believe these are examples of traditions that sometimes persist even though they may no longer have a practical purpose.  Business cards were once useful for people to exchange information about each other and then to file on a physical desktop as a way to find names and phone numbers of contacts.  Although we may still go through the motions of exchanging cards at an event, any actual connections with the colleagues met at conferences are usually via email and through contacts that were added on my mobile phone.  Those cards are still in my bag because I have not had a reason to refer to them since I put them in there, even though I have interacted with some of those people since we met.  I wonder when we will stop producing and exchanging physical business cards?  What does it take to stop going through the motions of an outdated tradition?