Book One-Post One

If there is a scale measuring technical ability (probably taped to a wall in Silicon Valley), I would put my hash mark somewhere in the middle. Assuming the low end consists of people who have trouble operating their 1998 Motorola cell and the high end consists of the hacker collective (collaborative?) Anonymous, I have enough gadgets and enough trouble using them to rank me with most of my age group. Generation Early-Thirties is old enough to have realized the dream of watching tiny televisions anywhere we went.

I am seven years older than my sister, or in Facebook years, 56 years older than my sister (Facebook years are one year more than dog years). This means I am smart enough to know I don’t have to learn all the cool stuff she knows how to do, I just act like I can’t figure it out and then get her to…oh wait, so that’s what my teachers were doing while we killed livestock on the Oregon Trail in the MAC lab? No, actually because we hadn’t grown up with 9 different computers in the house, we had no problem believing that our teacher was the authority in the computer lab. And if teacher couldn’t answer an operating question, that wasn’t a referendum on how ‘with it’ she was, it just meant we needed to Control + Alt + Delete.

Regardless if we grow up using an IPad or a Etch-a-Sketch we all really start from the same place. Ever seen a baby discover their hands? They have a look on their face, not of wonder or amazement—no, closer to, “Duh, that makes sense!” That’s about how I felt reading my first book pick, "Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities" by Wenger, White, & Smith. All the fudgeable terminology is put into context and the chapters are organized from macro to micro. The large type and graphic layout allows the eye to relax and the brain to work. After I finished this book, for the first time I felt my classroom ideas might actually be workable!