Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Some anecdotes regarding technology

 We live in astonishing, maybe miraculous times, even without talking Covid.


To illustrate: Sandy was showing me the Instagram feed of our daughter, photos of a very recent trip the Super Cousins (our grandkids, in other words!) and their parents had done into the heart of Strathcona Park. There was one photo in particular that I thought I needed for our board of family photos, a photo of them, after the hike, tired, triumphant, and soaking from the recent rain.

So I texted, specifying the photo, which promptly arrived by return text.

It went from her phone to my phone, which doesn’t have a printer connected, so I emailed it to myself, picked it up on my desktop computer, printed it on the attached photo printer, and posted it to the board. 


Nothing remarkable about this, right? But think about what just happened for a moment: that process, the precise route of a photo taken by my daughter’s phone, transmitted wirelessly to my phone, in a matter of minutes appearing on the board, would have been impossible as recently as 10 years ago!


Other examples:

Our eldest grandson, not yet 11, writes a blog of family news from his perspective for his cousins,  relatives, and friends. He started writing it for printing on their home printer several months ago using an old iPhone handed down from his mother, and often includes photos he has taken with the phone or collected from his aunts or cousins via his home’s wi-fi. His dad hooked him up with the blog and I believe he has now dumped the phone for a tablet, which allows him more choices of fonts and colours.

Our granddaughters, having been shown the ropes by their mother, a digital-age secondary teacher, regularly make, share, and send small movies to their grandparents and cousins.

Our daughter, who lives on the wrong side of the border so that we cannot see her family in person, communicates most days by Zoom, and regularly sends Snapchat videos, usually featuring their children, the younger of whom may be too young to remember us in person, but has no trouble talking to us remotely.


It’s particularly astonishing if one considers where we, in our lifetimes, started this journey.


In 2008, well before there were any “Super Cousins”, our daughter was teaching in Turkey. We talked to her on Skype quite regularly, although the connection was frequently unreliable. (But imagine! The stuff of science fiction only a few years earlier!) My dad, then into his 90’s, was over one day when she called, and so he was able to talk to her, face-to-face, in Istanbul. I took a photo, which remains one of my favourites. 

As a child he had had some experience with telephones, but his family didn’t have one, and I don’t think he personally had one in Holland until the late 1940’s. Later, after we were sufficiently settled in Terrace to afford one, it connected the entire Eby Road, and one knew when one was being called because the phone rang your ring: long, short, long.



When the Timberline staff moved into the brand-new school, specially wired for computer and internet connectivity in 1998, every teacher’s desk had a computer, connected by intranet to the school server. The district had initially gone big: that server had a full, hard-at-the-time-to-imagine, 20 Gigabyte capacity! (My present phone has 64) Anyway, there were about 80 such teacher desktops in the building, and it took less than a year before all 20 gigs were fully-used and people had to be told to remove personal stuff like photos and music. And of course the server had to be upgraded pretty-much every year, which was a pain because, predictably, the district had provided the initial tools (capital budget) but neither the technical support nor the money to maintain the system (operating budget).

While most of us took to the new system enthusiastically, predictably some of our colleagues were reluctant users of the technology at best: one colleague never did master the compulsory task of sending in the attendance for the period; he got a student in each of his classes to do it.

I still remember the joy when I discovered that I could get “Open Office” to run on the Windows machine at school and also on my Mac at home, so that I could, using a “floppy disk”, transport my files to where I needed them. Bonus! I no longer needed to get into the school at night or on weekends.

I still have some of those cases of “floppies”, even though I no longer have a way of looking at the contents. Pure laziness, or maybe nostalgia for an already-bygone era? (Thank goodness my desktop Mac still has a DVD “superdrive”; the three newer ones don’t, and our subscription to the BBC Music Magazine comes with a monthly CD of music from the BBC’s archives.)


Speaking of CDs (which are, in their turn, rapidly going obsolete, replaced by streaming services) we literally own several thousand. Of course we own a CD player, but almost never use it: I’d been fantasizing for years that one would be able to own and afford a storage system that would hold all of them, until, suddenly, there it was, an affordable one terrabyte drive. Shortly after I had loaded our music library onto it, it became possible to replace the wired connection without loss of fidelity, and nowadays we select the music we want on our music server and hear it played on our household speakers. An iPhone or iPad can even access the system remotely. 

I’m still boggled, every time I think about that.


Going further back:

When the use of technology came up in class, I sometimes indulged myself by regaling students with stories of technology when I was their age, in high school. Did all the science nerds carry slide-rules? You bet they did. And were we issued log tables in Grade 12 Math? Count on it! And what kind of phones did we have, or cameras, or stereo systems?...etc. Did my students really believe me? Doubt it!


When I started my career in 1969 attendance was done in a register, which had to be “balanced” at the end of the year. At the end of my first year that process took so long that one of the secretaries finally took pity on me, said she’d do it, and sent me home for the holidays. Obviously, I’ve never forgotten that act of kindness, or the frustration of not getting the figures to match. Bless first the secretary, then the calculator and subsequently the computer for changing that bookkeeping task.

Also at the beginning of my career I was introduced to the BCTF publication of a list of numerators and denominators translated into percentages: if your gradebook shows 64/106, what percentage do you report? At the time, an era before the hand-held calculator, a lifesaver.

So that when, in the mid-80’s, my colleague Dan showed me the first, primitive, mark manager that would run on a Circle 128, like him I was an instant convert. 


Obviously I could go on. Our teacher daughters, even when they’re not required to teach remotely, operate in a digital world I couldn’t operate in any longer, and I’ve only been retired for 15 years. And that statement doesn’t even consider their students, who are, for the same reason, already not the same as the students I taught.


And change is speeding up.

Events frequently conspire to lull us into a belief system that suggests we’re still largely operating in a society we recognize from our youth, with added technology. We’re not, and if you are reluctant to believe me, pay close attention as we reopen schools and make our way through the pandemic!


It’s going to be a fascinating, if bumpy, ride. (Assuming we survive it.)

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