These are the contents (waterbottle, macbook, glasses case, notebook, pen, and extra socks in case it’s raining during my daily commute) of my daily bag that I carry to and from my grade 7 classroom that I teach here in Vancouver BC. I keep my materials as simplistic and minimalistic as possible as I commute using public transit and don’t want to carry the extra weight. Given how useful and powerful macbooks are today, I haven’t found much need to carry anything else.
As an educator, I do bring work home with me as it is impossible to complete all work tasks in the classroom. You may notice the absence of paper and that is because I have shaped my practice so that my students submit their work electronically and I do all of my marking digitally. My next goal is to have everything I do as a teacher uploaded onto cloud services so that I don’t have to carry my laptop at all in this bag.
I would breakdown the importance of my items as 80 percent favouring my macbook and 20 percent for everything as I rely on my laptop heavily in my daily communication with the world. This item shows my literacy in digital navigation and organization as I have spent a lifetime creating and organizing my life using computers. My notebook is something I use to record intrapersonal thoughts as a way to practice mindfulness when I take public transit. It also gives me peace of mind as I know that this technology does not require a battery charge. The two items go hand in hand as often my hand written recorded thoughts serve as reminders of various tasks I need to complete on my computer. If I were to travel 15 to 25 years into the past, I don’t think a single laptop and notebook would suffice as a teacher. Stacks of papers, a gradebook and other non-digital tools would definitely also be a part of this bag.
If an archeologist were to find this bag 100 years in the future, I would suppose that they would marvel at the archaic macbook technology I used as my central source of productivity as keyboards and AR technology would likely be obsolete. However, I hope that my minimalistic approach wouldn’t be far off from the future of text technology that is coming down the pipeline.