Consider the course title, “Text technologies: The changing spaces of reading and writing.” What is text? What is technology? How would you define these terms? Without consulting any resources, record your initial thoughts on these questions.

The automatic association I have with text is words while technology with devices, tools that make life faster or easier than before.

One of my favourite things to teach is literature circles. In one of the roles, Bridge Builder, students are asked to form connections to their reading. Sometimes, I would receive questions about where connecting a passage to a movie would fall under: text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world? This asks me revisit my initial impressions on text. Movies are text. Songs are text. Could artwork be considered text? Text, then, should encompass anything that carries a message or meaning, often with the intent to be shared with others. Thus, memes, a voicemail, an emoji, instagram posts, podcasts, and more, are all “texts.”

The definition of technology is dynamic and responds to its time. What may be seen as a technological advancement may be considered obsolete in another generation. Writing is technology, but has been improved upon with the typewriter, and then with the computer, and now with predictive texting and speech-to-text ‘technology.’ This reminds me of how some of my students would make fun of (with good reason) the technology we have at our school, as some of it is very old and frustrating to use. However, this was not the case a few years ago when the Chromebooks were fairly new. Technology is technology, even if it isn’t very good, but our expectations of it to work reliably perhaps suggests we have a more subjective definition of what technology should be.