Forever Updating

Hey everyone! I hope that you are all having a fantastic week!

This week I will be reflecting on our ever-changing world of technology after watching a keynote video by Michael Wesch a ____. This video was created in 2008, and it is a reflection of how quickly global culture changed after the development of the world wide web and specifically the webcam.

My first takeaway after watching this video was how innocent we were to the development of the internet. We were clueless as to what was to come. After watching this, I also couldn’t help but realize that the developments that Wesch talks about are extremely outdated. The advancements that have been made in the past 12 years are mind-blowing.

As a pre-service teacher, it is both exciting and nerve-racking to see such rapid advancements. With all things new, there comes education, and I believe that education on technology is crucial for the safety of children and adults too! For schools, this means that teachers need to be current with technology so that we can assist our students and (hopefully) prevent any harm that can come from it.

As Walsh would say, webcams open the door to “about a billion people worldwide” (12 years later, and this number has quadrupled), which is somewhat freighting. However, he also goes onto say that we can now connect and express ourselves in ways we have never been able to before. Walsh does an extremely good job at demonstrating the culture that the internet and specifically, webcams have created.

I say this is nerve-racking because the scale on which technology and the internet have grown since 2008 is mind-blowing. Each development, advancement, and breakthrough comes with a whole load of education. How to use it, how not to, the pros, cons, etc. The “easy” part is learning how to use it. The hard part- learning about the cons. After a development like a webcam, we didn’t comprehend or anticipate the damage it could do until the damage was done. This is why education on technology is so important and deserves a place in the classroom.

Moving forward, I believe that there should technology education built into the curriculum so that our students can use it properly and safely. Technology has a place in contemporary classrooms, and I am very excited as a preservice teacher to integrate it into my classroom!

I MAY HAVE JUST HAD THE BIGGEST “I WAS TODAY YEARS OLD WHEN” MOMENT… picture a URL… or look at this one https://www.ctv.ca/ Did anyone else know that WWW stands for World Wide Web?! I just realized this while writing this post. Mind=Blown