Seeing The Code

Photo by Julia M Cameron on Pexels

If you were to ask me to recall a time in my life without technology, I sincerely believe I couldn’t recount such a time. From a young age, technology has been deeply ingrained in both my upbringing and cultivation of knowledge. I frequently remember cartoons such as “Dora the Explorer” and “Max and Ruby” playing in the backdrop of my childhood. Even now, I could watch episodes of those shows and recall the exact lines in the scenes, but not recount what visually happens. At the time, my eyes would be trained on a variety of “Leap Frog” books that would match illustrations with their common name: the iPad before the iPad. I would press on the image of a frog and hear “Frog!” shouted back at me from the simple, electronic book. Little did I know that these experiences would train me for the abundance of technology and management of stimuli from electronic devices.

Presently, I use technology in the form of apps, websites, or software in my daily life for a mix of leisure and work. Oftentimes, I find myself scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit to pass the time or connect with others. Sometimes the time I spend on these apps can be educational, but I don’t actively seek to be educated or find knowledge when using these social media. Most of my academic or professional work I keep restricted to specific sites such as my own website, Microsoft Office Tools, URCourses, and Obsidian. For the most part, I’d assume most readers know what these sites are aside from Obsidian.

Photo by Kerde Severin on Pexels

Obsidian is a really helpful, efficient, and advanced software for organizing notes, concepts, or random ideas in a way that is both intuitive and innovative. Personally, I like to use this software as a place for my biology notes. Many would agree that the nature of most biology courses is purely memorization. As such, having software that can tabulate definitions for you, create stunning visual graphs between those definitions, and show you the instances in which those definitions are used is so incredibly useful. There are many guides that are out there to help users optimize their time with the software and to organize their

Screenshot of my Obsidian Notes Graphed

Close up screenshot of my Obsidian Notes Graph

workspace.

As useful as this software is, I always wonder how long it will be until AI takes over this aspect of my work process. I haven’t really delved too much into what AI is capable of doing in my life, but I know that it holds a lot of power and can effectively transform how I do work. I frequently question whether I should work towards becoming adept in the use of AI or be an observer of what it produces and how it develops – I haven’t decided on either; regardless, I’m excited to go forward with this class and into the future with a foundational knowledge of how to use developing technology.