How did you begin, in technology?

[Connie Weber]

There must be a million ways to frame that question, all laden with nuances of meaning and implicit biases. Let me try some other ways. Think of where you are now with regard to using computers online. Where are you? (What do you do, now, on the computer, what's your typical usage pattern?) How'd you get to where you are?

Can you think of a beginning point for your road into technology use? Was there a definable starting point or was the inroad gradual? After you got started, did one thing lead to another thing? Can you remember anything about the sequence?

People who are brand new to tech, or brand new to this particular use of technology--networking--please share observations about the learning experience, including what it feels like to go through the learning processes within a new technology. (I think paying attention to the feeling component of our involvement with technological learning is essential, that's one of my biases.) Do you find this site "intuitive"? What do you wish you could do right away, what are you searching to learn? What is unfolding to you as you get more familiar with networking; what insights are you getting? Are you frustrated, intimidated, overwhelmed, uncertain whether you want to participate---any or all of those, and also are you thrilled, fortified, excited, curious, happy to experiment, charged-up, motivated?

For me there was a clear and conscious beginning point. I knew at one particular moment that clicking one particular button was my entry point into a new world. I jumped into "web2.0." Happy to talk about it; I'll join into the discussion as it unfolds.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Connie, what a great question! I am very curious how others will answer. It is something I wonder about a lot because for me there is a crystal-clear before-and-after moment. This was in 1998, and I distinctly remember having had a conversation with a friend who was curious about the Internet and telling him that it didn't have anything to do with the academic world, nothing useful there at all. I was interested in computers - very much interested in computers, in fact, because I was a database programmer (good old dBaseIII+) and I used email to communicate with friends in Europe, but the INTERNET meant nothing to me. In fact, I was scornful of it - an attitude I see among so many academics today; I was scornful even though I knew almost nothing about it.

Well, I was also seriously broke, and I needed a job. A professor in the Classics department had sent around a note to all the graduate students saying that he needed someone to help him build a webpage of resources for the Classics department, and it was okay if the person didn't know how to built a webpage, because he didn't know how to do it either, so training was part of the job. Well, I had no real interest in that job but I needed the money, and I did like computers, so I applied for the job.

Much to my surprise, he called me in to his office the next week and said I had the job. I fell all over myself thanking him for having hired me and he just laughed and told me I was the only person who had applied for the job!!! Ha! Even when offered money as compensation, not a single one of the other graduate students had any interest in the job.

Well, here's what happened: that Friday, I went to a one-hour training session at our library in using Netscape Composer to create a simple webpage - in that one hour, we learned to make a page with links and images. I WAS HOOKED. I literally stayed up all weekend long, and did not sleep for two nights, I was so absolutely completely totally captivated by the simple act of browsing the Internet, looking for resources, and adding links to my page.

And the rest, as they say, is history. It's one of the most dramatic before-and-after moments in my life, and I often wonder just how long it would have taken for that to happen if that particular professor had not needed to hire a graduate student to make some webpages back in 1998...

:-)

[Steven Paul Pritchard]

My first step was to buy a commodore 64 and then an apple

I took computers classes at DMACC here in Des Moines Iowa, then I got a break!

One day I was asked to become the training sales person in the Training Dept at CompUSA, I asked who would my boss be, well your on your own, you have one teacher

It was me and him (Steven and Tim) I sold the computer classes and he thought. them
With in 6 mo we were selling 100,000 a mo.
Now I am the District Training Mng and he was one of two teachers that were working for me.

We went from doing one word class to
2 TOFEL Programs a week, TSA testing FFDO, Promissor, CAT Testing, Word, excel, access, outlook powerpoint, tests MS Testing Cert.
Now e have three teachers and all three class rooms were in use 9 to 10 hours a day some days more.
I did a radio spot useing my money not CompUSA mondy for a radio spot, from that we brought in THE VA to teach the vet's how to use computers and programs,
Today CompUSA is closed here in Iowa,
Today I am on the council at the Drake University adult literacy center. I took tech tools to DC to show members of congress.
These tools have helped me I believe they can help others.
( not great at spelling them but here goes)
K reader mobil
The Kurizwell 3000
Dragon Nat speaking
Text program
Brosealoud
I love tech tools I just wish I could get back into it and help people like me. Or just help people.
I am so tired of b

[Steven Paul Pritchard]

Connie when I went to Dc for the VALUE conference I saw in peoples eyes how easy it was fo rme to use these tech tools.
alot of people are like me Print Disabled, these people read books and on line story all the time.
in my tech area I have seen people who can not read black and with but when thre turning on the computer the first thing I see is there eyes light with WOW! Because of the color of the text.

I wish I was out of the guard house and teaching people again.
Steven

[Ian Carmichael]

Testimony time, eh!

Hi, my name's Ian and I'm a recovering teacher...

First up involvements were with my starting science degree (1971) - we had a compulsory 6 weeks programming course - FORTRAN coded, on 'pre-punched' cards. Then a little exposure to computer databases, knowledge repositories and computer based teaching (the names ERIC and PLATO loomed large) in my education training (1975/6). Next was involvement in the development of a senior high school Computer Science course (1979?) for our state, and the implementation of a cut-down version at our Evening School (teaching algorithms and BASIC programming - mark-sense cards and occasionally a terminal connection on a Spectrum II - rebadged PDP-11).
About that point, I left school-teaching, and took up pastoral studies and pastoring. Next step in the technology trail was using it for communication. Pastoring a church, one of the key publications is the bulletin, and the chore of its production, and the frustration of people not reading it. Enter the Apple Mac - and I got very interested in desktop publishing, and usability. I wouldn't have dreamed of inflicting anything but a Mac on my middle-aged congregation for them to to learn and use document presentation skills.
That's basically where I stayed until 1996 - a few stints of relief teaching, with a few computer classes, but nothing really of great change. '96 I returned to the classroom, and '97 I took up the computer science/computer studies teaching position, and a part in shifting our computer platforms to a consistent, networked, school-wide accessible system. Over the years we've incremented the development of the system, a few years ago moving to a teacher laptop program. I've kept a hand in with staff PD, mainly the conventionals like presentations and spredsheets, document repositories, the student databases, our VOD system, and an 'argument mapper' called Rationale.
The 'jump' for me came from exposure, first to discussion boards in the WebCT framework for my Computer Science degree and then to Web 2.0 via Will Richardson, and thence Steve Hargadon at Classroom 2.0, and thus Fireside Learning through Connie. Up to this point, technology as I saw it, had it and used it was simply a tool to allow what could be done otherwise to be now done better and neater.
But blogs and forums allow for interchange and development in ways that weren't possible in my classroom. I've been able to implement, mainly in my RE class structures that enable ideas to be tried out, feedback to be given, and students to communicate directly with each other in ways and at times not possible in the flesh and blood classroom.
The key to this, for me was my participation in these two nings - so I've developed skill at using fora, blogs and comments, and have been confident to develop nings of my own - discussing digital education within the school, computer studies, ethics, and science-and-religion sites.
But I played 'ning' with Steve and Connie for about a year before pushing my own boat out for my college and students.
And so, my teaching is revolutionised? No, but there are new levels of learning and interaction possible for me and my classes which they didn't have from me before, just as here there is a platform for collegiality, interchange and engagement that didn't exist until Connie created it.

Thank you for listening...

[Nathan Lowell]

Some of you know I started out early. In 1964, I built a five-bit binary adder for the Junior High School Science Fair -- back before they started calling it Middle School. It won second prize because the math and science teachers judging the event said, "Yes, well, there's not much future in a numbering system that only goes up to 1, now, is there?" I built an analog multiplier for the next year's fair. It didn't do any better, but I blame that on the fact that the first prize went to a girl who brewed dandelion wine from the dandelions in her lawn.

I had a math teacher who was a member of the team who broke Enigma in WWII -- altho I didn't know what that was at the time. He got me on the Darmouth computer when they first started playing with remote access using acoustically coupled modems attached to teletype machines. I think this was sometime around 1969, but I'm not sure. I do remember that was when I learned to program in BASIC.

So for the next -- call it 40 years -- I grew up with a movement. While my peers were tearing down '57 Chevys, I was designing transistor logic circuits and dreaming of the day when I could get enough money together to build it.

Flash forward to 1996.

After a career in information systems that had me work up from Data Entry Clerk to VP of Managament Information Systems, I shifted to Educational Technology through the odd mechanism of needing to be a student to get internet access and accumulating enough hours to make the MA a done deal. This is significant because it's where I started learning of the disconnect between Education and Technology in my Distance Ed classes.

One day in class, my Distance Ed teacher made a startling pronouncement. "Distance Education is difficult because courses offered at a distance -- especially online -- isolate students away from the social engagement necessary to foster good learning."

Buh?!

She assured me all the research bore out that finding. She sent me the citations.

So I went home and logged on. I asked my friends in London, Singapore, Sidney, New York, Texas ... Did they feel isolated when they were online?

The universal "bwahahahahaha" was pretty telling.

Sooo. I went to the citations and discovered that all the research was done in courses that actively prevented students from talking to each other.

I took my findings back to my professor and said, "Look, you can't blame the technology if teachers are building courses that isolate students. The findings are only reporting that the design goal of student isolation is working."

She looked like I'd hit her with a brick, but she listened and started asking questions about connections and how to do them and how to control them and ... I drove her crazy. I set up environments that included message boards, listservs and chat rooms. I taught her how to moderate a discussion. I showed her how message boards work for some limited applications -- and remember this was pre-blog, pre-rss -- and how email actually worked as an instructional medium when you got over the idea that it was "correspondence" course by putting a full blown discussion on a listserv.


Flash forward to today.

I got my PhD in educational technology. I work in the area of creating accessible, online learning experiences for people who are blind or visually impaired. I'm an adjunct professor teaching online in another state.

I still teach textbased MUD in my courses and I drive my students crazy because the first week is always the same -- start a blog, get an aggregator, link all together, answer these questions together. Oh, and while you can pass, even get an A on your own, you can't get the highest marks unless you're so engaging that you involve others in your conversation.

Yes, that's right. Your grade depends on somebody else - some stranger - doing something on the basis of your effort. If you don't engage the world, you don't get the highest marks.

The punchline is: I teach grad school and my students are mostly in-service teachers working in rural K-12 schools in Kentucky.

One of the points that may be lost here is that one of the key "issues" that Education is trying to deal with is how to prepare kids to be successful in jobs that don't exist yet and we don't know what they might be. Because, this is, you know, something new -- this rate of change thing.

Except it's not.

It's been going on for my entire life. I now work in a field that didn't exist in 1970 when I graduated from high school. The internet was still a -12 on the geek-level visibility scale when I got my BS in Business Admininstration in 1992. Academe was struggling to catch up with the implications of ubiquitous access to web-based information when I got my PhD in 2004. It's only beginning to realize that the game changer isn't access to information. It's access to communications!

So here I am today. Podcast novelist. Online teacher. 21st Century Learner.

Not bad for being interested in "a numbering system that only goes up to 1."