Random Thoughts

The article on Connectivism was fantastic, especially in that it was academically engaging. I hope this program continues to be more about theory and ideas rather than a "how to" on using software. There really does seem to be a massive shift in the works with education. I like the inquiry mode and self-directed learning, which seems to be made all the easier with technology and some good guidance for students on how to use it.

I think it would be interesting to know peoples' (in this program) experience with computers from the beginning. For example, I first had a "computer" when I was about 12 years old--a Commador VIC20!

The bestially powerful VIC20 featured ZERO megabytes of anything. I would spend HOURS entering page after page of basic code into the thing, hit "run" then spend a few minutes shooting down the crudest of space aliens....then turn the thing off and the program would be gone. No hard drive-type memory what so ever. In fact, the first data storage device I had was basically a tape recorder that I could plug into the thing to save programs I'd typed in.

Jumping ahead about 10 years, in college I had my first "real" computer which had an at-the-time eye-popping 80meg hard drive and ONE meg of RAM...and a scary-fast 25 megahertz processor. I think for me the good part about having these early home computers (at least when they had become affordable) is that from the start I was always willing (be necessity, actually) to "mess around" with the thing. In fact, in my college days any time I got any sort of new program (bought on floppy drive from the computer store) I would almost always have to call the tech support line as the process of simply loading a program rarely seemed to work smoothly. And as often as not, tech support would walk me through a series of rather complex steps, including unscrewing the top of the computer and pulling out wires and re-inserting them in a different configuration. In those days the idea of "plug and play" was a long way off.

So, anyhow, though I'm too old to be a digital native, I have been using computers, albeit crude ones, since I was 12 years old. I don't know what that means, but there you go.