Hello Blog World

I wrote this in response to an in-class reading assignment during the week following August 25, 2008:

I love using my kids as guinea pigs and I have to admit that as the article "Synching Up with the iKid: Connecting to the Twenty-First-Century Student" (http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-digital-learner) points out, kids today are not at all the kid I was 25 years ago. I remember watching The Jetsons cartoon on Saturday mornings (we didn't have cable so that was the only time all week that cartoons were on, except for one night a week when Wonderful World of Disney was on--that's when you got to see Mickey and 101 Dalmations because VCRs were just coming out and nobody owned a zillion Disney moview on VHS) and being fascinated by robots vacuuming and talking to your boss via TV screen. I remember my dad (a mechanical engineer) bringing home a computer from work (nobody we knew actually had one in their home) to show us this cool game: on the eery green screen would appear this prompt: "Guess the number between 1 and 100"; you typed "8" and ENTER and it would type "Higher" so you typed "99" and ENTER and it typed "Lower" until you guessed the computer's number. Our whole family was mesmerized; then a few years later we thought Space Invaders on the ATARI was the coolest thing ever invented. I grew up actually swimming at the pool, not sitting in the lawn chair next to the pool texting my friend who is sitting right next to me.

Last night my 13-year-old was texting on his cell phone at lightning speed while listening to his iPod while searching the Internet on one of our family's three computers for resources for his 8th grade current event paper on global warming on one window and MSN-ing other friends on another window while eating a burrito and flipping between the Republican National Convention, Channel 5 news, and some dirt bike race on ESPN. When everyone's homework was done, we played Wii Rockband (and as usual, my vocals got me boo-ed off the stage).

Earlier this week I talked with my kids about this article and they agreed that I am definitely a digital immigrant. Sometimes my first thought when they have a research assignment is to drive over to the neighborhood community library because that is how I did it growing up. We looked in encyclopedias and card catalogs (index cards in an actual card file). I resist the latest digital scrapbooking craze because I like holding the pictures and books in my hand. We talk about doint their best legible cursive handwriting and one says, "Why? Typing is ten times faster and the teacher can actually read it!"

They brought up my college textbook editing job. For 13 years as they were growing up, I worked as a freelance editor/proofer for a local textbook composition company. Weekly I brought home manuscript piles taller than I am and used probably millions of yellow sticky-notes and red ink pens. So, last year the company closed its doors because it has been bought out by a larger company on the East Coast who later was bought out by a larger company in India. This company asked me to continue to freelance but it would suddenly be all-electronic workflow. That meant I needed a new computer with super-high speed Internet connections, new editing software, and a monitor that would display both manuscript and folios so I could read it and mark it up. I struggled with this for months because my eyes, my neck, my brain couldn't adjust. For one job I actually did print the files out (two reams of paper) so I could do it my old-fashioned way, which is still a lot faster for me! I'll never meet my project managers or co-workers face-to-face. The textbook industry is changing to because more professors are going electronic.

I saw more computer use at Back-to-School night last week at my kids' elementary school than ever before. Each teacher had a PowerPoint presentation of class rules, explanation of improved Reading Counts school-wide book computer quiz program, and every week I'm supposed to look up on PowerSchool their grades (no more grade reports on paper!).

One thing I've noticed in my son's writing (and a few instances in the responses to the article cited above), having the eye of a print editor, is that the abbreviations used in email and texting are creeping into writing for all purposes. "Y" means "Why". I am not fluent in the new language so I don't automatically get it. When I get the cell phone bill and see that my son wrote 4051 texts in two days, I realize that his brain thinks in abbreviations because they are faster to type and read, and why spell "why" when "Y" works? It reminds me of the Newspeak described in George Orwell's "1984". I guess I still use Oldspeak.

After I click "Publish Post", I am going to log onto my on-line Psychology course to listen to an 0n-line recorded lecture of my professor in Denver (again, someone I'll never meet face-to-face), follow along with his PowerPoint slides and accompanying lecture notes, and then post my responses to my course peers (who abbreviate too) on Blackboard, and then take a test on-line about it all. I remember reading a science fiction story in 2nd grade about a boy who did his homework on a little typewriter box that had a brain and he did all his learning at home; he never stepped foot in a classroom, never held a book in his hands, never wrote with a number 2 pencil. Now I am that little boy.