Technology Autobiography

I’m in a workshop called ”Blogging and Podcasting” with Kevin, our technology liaison at the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.  And although I’ve already started blogging, I know I have a lot to learn!  Kevin has asked us to write our Technology Autobiography.  So, here it goes!  You can listen to an audiocast of my Technology Autobiography by clicking on the tech at the end of this post.

During graduate school, my job in Harvard’s African American Studies Department  brought me in contact with my first computer.  Thank goodness!  I can’t tell you how many late nights I snuck into my office to use the computer to transcribe all the interviews I was conducting and write all my thesis papers.  It quickly became hard to imagine all those undergraduate English papers I wrote on the typewriter–talk about a hindrance to revision! 

Over the next ten years, it seemed like every new teaching job brought with it a new wave of technology in computers.  Sounds like a great thing, and it was in many ways, but it also meant that all the teacher files I had created over the years were no longer accessible–stuck on floppy disks (real floppy) or on software that could not be transferred to the newest and latest technology.  Frustrating!  I still have all those old files on floppy disks and I wonder what they say?  One set even contains half of a book I started to write one summer.

While teaching in Seattle, I remember getting a computer from the school!  And it was portable, if you call stuffing a Mac into a 2 x 3 foot suit case (without wheels), throwing it over your shoulder and toting it back and forth to work, portable.  Of course, this was before laptops!  It certainly did help free me from those late nights and Saturdays holed up in my classroom.

Taking the next few years off from teaching proved to be a lifetime in the world of technological advances.  When I returned to Massachusetts from Washington and New Mexico, I returned to a world of email and internet.  Wow, did I have a lot of catching up to do.  I’m a pokey learner–but I’m learning.  Having adolescent children helps!  But my most important mentor in the world of technology is the National Writing Project.  Look at me now I’m blogging!  What next?!

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