Survival of the Fittest

As an educator, Dr. Kathleen King said on her website ( http://www.kpking.com/#A1), “technology will throw you into these conflicts,” posing challenges, and sometimes crises. “In the ‘70s,” she says, learning about new technologies was, “a nice thing to do. Today, it’s survival.”

I can relate to that. As I said in an earlier blog, I was around in the '70s, and it was a nice thing to do. Later, I drifted away from the field, married, had children, and life moved on. Much later, I moved to South Dakota and lost touch with the world. Getting cable TV was exciting, I could not see much use for an expensive computer that would cost me an arm and a leg to connect to the internet. They charged by the minute in my neck of the woods.

Life moved on and I moved to Las Vegas, NV. Suddenly, life was very fast, everyone wanted everything 5 minutes ago. I had to reconnect with technology. My daughter's 6th grade class was scheduled to take part in a video learning project that originated in Hawaii. I felt very old and, often, very out of place. But I started to get back into the swing of things, and, here I am, older, but once again finding that learning new technology is a nice thing to do.

More than that, it is the key to surviving some of the changes that are coming in the workplace. The demand to learn faster, and provide learning more economically, is an ever increasing pressure on today's teaching professionals and workers. There are so many tools out there that, for me, the most frustrating part of the process is learning the practical part. How do you make all of these cool little parts of the process work together to create a memorable learning experience?

It is like magic to me. The power that is out there to change people's perspective, provide information, expand horizons. It is amazing. I still feel the frustration of the learning curve. This blog was suppose to provide information on how to add streaming audio to a blog site; obviously, that will have to come a bit later. Once I figure out how to do it.