Does it float all boats in the world of education? I have noticed time and time again that once faculty begin using an online tool such as WebCT, they begin using all sorts of other technology resources in teaching and learning as well. It’s as though the WebCT platform finally matched the instructor threshold, and now those who were timid about stepping off the old train can now finally take some tentative steps into new territory. Not that the tool need be WebCT; it’s just the one that is conveniently available in my world. There’s something about this process that I kind of love – it’s a natural evolution by those who are most curious first and then followed by those they’ve told, it’s freely chosen by the faculty (well, free except for the part where we chose WebCT for them), it’s a creative choice in that faculty use it in whatever ways they can imagine, up to the limits of their knowledge of the software and of their student’s capabilities, and it’s a way to give faculty ownership of some of this. I think many faculty have felt that technology is foisted upon them from time to time, and this gives them some power over that rude intrusion. Some of the pressure comes from students, of course – this is the way we work and communicate now.

Much as I love multimedia and other forms of technology, I mourn just a little bit for the loss of the written word. It wasn’t the best code there ever was, but it was a good code and it served us well for a very long time. Books and animals were my chief comforts growing up, after all. We moved so often it was hard to develop an identity, keep a hobby or maintain relationships. Books kept me intellectually engaged and out of who-knows-what-all trouble, when I might have otherwise just wallowed in a teen-aged funk otherwise. Plus, books engage us deeply, for a long time, in a way that has a cognitive impact that technology sources don’t. Books, to me, are often almost like mini-relationships because they evoke such deep emotions and so much thought.

I read that older women are the chief purchasers of books these days. Men don’t read much and they don’t read fiction at all, it seems. What a pity for them that they can’t access the world we older women live in. They have sports and movies, and I suppose men enjoy things like working on cars, collecting Star Wars action figures and watching porn too, but these things are so fleeting and shallow to me. Anyway, the best movies come from books originally! It’s all about the story, and I never understand why we’d want to limit storytelling to just the existential world when the imaginary world holds so much more promise.