Keeping up with Technology

Hi everyone-

I am currently finishing up my time in the OTEC program and I must say that technology is a entirely different animal than anything I have ever come into contact with. Over the past several years, throughout my undergraduate program as well as this one, I've learned more technologies than I ever knew existed, and I've discovered that it's a never ending process. The internet is a road to everywhere and there is no way to gather together or tame the amount of technology that can fly at us at any given time. As an educational technologist, my job will constantly involve working my way through a lot of software, some that I will feel comfortable using and some I will not.

When I first started using technology I believed that it made my life easier--and more productive. I can type a paper, format it, and make it ready to publish much faster in Microsoft Word than I ever could on a manual typewriter. But I soon realized that it also makes my life more complicated by requiring me to dig through a huge amount of information. I can't just open a new program and know immediately how to use it; I have to read about it, and play with it before I'm able to actually create something with it. How do we control technology?

The answer, I believe, is that we don't. We keep moving forward, and learning more and more about the tools that will make our lives easier, more organized, and enables us to reach far and wide. Since there is no controlling the complete chaos of the internet, I would advise a colleague to first be aware of what they're looking for when discovering new technologies. Technology has to have meaning in order to make us more productive, and they also need to know what they're trying to accomplish before they start looking at all the technology that is available. If you don't know what you're trying to do, and how you want to do it, you're not going to know when you've found the right Web 2.0 tool to help accomplish it.

Since technology is always going to change and evolve, we have to do the same. There is no right or wrong way to keep up with technology, or keep track of it; what's most important is that we just keep discovering it.

tm