Predictive Text by Charmaine Collinge

In Charmaine’s post on predictive text, she wrote, ” As a teacher, I’ve had students who struggle with writing use a predictive-text feature on their computers because it allowed them to just select the word they wanted rather than trying to spell it out. However, with recent improvements to the voice-to-text features, these students don’t even use predictive text frequently anymore.”

I found this statement was provoking, as it speaks to the dynamic nature of technology – ever changing, ever evolving, and ever making older forms obsolete. Within the span of my own life I’ve communicated in the following ways:

With each passing decade, technological advances provided new options for communication, while making older options obsolete. In examining my Personal History of Communication, it’s interesting to note how the evolution of technology moved slowly at first, but is currently unrolling at top speed. Before starting the MET program, I’d never used Mattermost, Slack or Hangouts. I look forward to reflecting back at this time next year, in order to make note of the communication tools currently in use, versus those which have becoming personally obsolete.