WEEK 1

Whoosh. Welcome to the 21st century. "Technology across the Curriculum" did not rate a blip on the radar during my formative education years in 1970s Australia. Our classroom “technology’ experiences consisted of the annoying watery plop, plop from the fish tank filter and muffled tones from a miniature ray-lamp warming our resident guinea pigs throughout Melbourne winters. Those experiences did, however, prompt thoughts on one of Greg’s most confronting admissions in his first lecture. As new teachers, we will be creating learning systems and processes for children who will work in areas and jobs not even invented yet. And that’s an exciting prospect.

I didn’t type on a keyboard until my 11th year of education, at Blackburn High School, and that was for a computer programming assignment I didn’t really appreciate at the time. My first experiences with the internet and email were not until the late 1990s when Rupert Murdoch decided to upgrade his hulking fleet of old-fashioned desktops, fax and photo gram machines at News Limited. And he only did so because Sydney was hosting the 2000 Olympics and the Y2K bug. As journos, we had to file stories quicker than via an archaic desktop publishing system or speaking to a lovely lady on the other end of the phone typing our prose word for word. New York, London, Paris, Montmorency, Werribee … it took time to file, no matter where you were.

Moving on .... I enjoyed Greg’s delivery and passion for his subject, however, I did feel a little uncomfortable when he related his experience in one school where he insisted computers be switched on before class commenced. I’m not totally in favour with this philosophy, as I beleive it creates anticipation (negative or positive, real or otherwise) that students will be using the computers immediately or have the opportunity to play games. I think they are also an unnecessary distraction in the classroom. Personally, flicking a switch on a computer each morning creates an automatic response as if turning on the TV or the heater, or opening the fridge door when you arrive home from work. We do it without thinking, and thinking is what we need to explore.

And finally, mapping, diagram drawing and – The Blog. Didn’t Hollywood release a movie The Blog in the 1960s? Mastering Inspiration software and concept mapping will be an ongoing process. I enjoyed fiddling around with symbols, illustrations and branches in our mini task. I felt like a kid again. I was probably a little more immersed in doodling on the computer than listening to Greg’s instructions, as can be evidenced by my efforts. The blog. Yes, well, the blog did require patience and a little bit of tweaking. I tried edublogs.org, but that didn’t work for me, so on the advice of a neighbourly student, I decided to set-up my blog on Blogger.com. I preferred the simplicity of the display, login process, settings, templates and edit features. And God Bless the Russians - a pencil in space. What a master stroke. I hope the bigwigs at NASA took notes on the experiment and put it in the following year's budget.