(Image by Arturo_Anez from Pixabay)
When I was an undergraduate, I was writing term papers the hard way - with a typewriter and correction tape. I progressed to an electric typewriter and correction tape in graduate school - still submitting rough drafts and then retyping, often again and again.
Then, in the early 1980's, I got my first computer, an Apple 2E - a cumbersome thing with five-inch floppy discs and minimal memory. As a high school teacher, I found it a word-processing godsend for preparing lessons and accessing educational software.
The five-inch floppies quickly became obsolete and I upgraded to the newest Mac sensation with all of ten megabytes! That machine followed me to Germany where I used it for six years, not only for lesson preparation, but also for writing letters home, writing the draft of my first novel, and finally for sending out resumes prior to my return.
Upon coming back to the States in 1992, my new job was at a middle school of technology. The Internet was still in its infancy and the goal was to have the staff and students become computer literate through curriculum integration of technology. Some staff had to be taught how to turn their computers on. At least I had had a head start!
However, I knew that I needed a more powerful machine at home to match my new ones in the classroom. And it had to be powerful enough to handle the new Internet phenomenon. I upgraded to 64 megabytes of built-in memory plus I gigabyte on the hard drive. Within a year, I, along with the rest of the school staff, couldn't remember how we had gotten along without school e-mail. I noticed how interested the students seemed in computers and how they seemed to be soaking up technological information easily. In the first couple of years, they only had access to a weekly computer class and occasional time on a handful of computers in their subject classrooms. I started to look at ways to incorporate computers into my curriculum and I began applying for grants to obtain more of them.
With a colleague, I designed a community service curriculum. At first, the students were required to research a social issue related to their service and type it on the computer. Through workshops, courses, and my own research, I learned about advancing technologies that I passed on to the students. Each year, over nine years, the curriculum acquired more depth. By the year 2001, the program had evolved into an internationally award-winning multi-media project, involving, among other things, Internet research, digital video editing on the computer, CD-Rom creation and web site design.
My newest home computer was upgraded to 256 megabytes plus 60 gigabytes of memory on the hard drive and 800 megahertz of power to keep up with the web site management and various other program coordinator tasks. Learning the hard way about mediocre video quality on CD-Rom, I made sure that one had a DVD burner. When I retired, I used it to research and finish my long put-aside first novel.
The cutting-edge usefulness of each computer seemed to have a shorter and shorter life span. By 2003, I was looking at all the new wireless advances and wondering if my sleek flat-screen desktop model was outmoded already. It was a dinosaur compared to today’s creative opportunities using wireless laptops, tablets, smart phones, and the ease of world-wide connectivity. What had seemed miraculous at the time, pales in comparison to the power and reach of technology today, but I have used and enjoyed each and every advancement.