I remember on the first day of class, I told my partner I was pretty proficient in computers. All those days I spent playing tech support for all my older relatives, and being the go-to graphic design girl in my business class in high school, gave me a faux sense of confidence when it came to computers. When I initially thought learning how to use the command line had to do with making graphic lines, was my first sign of trouble. VirtualBox was a bit of a shock at first, considering the expectations I had. On top of that, even though I’m concentrating in English, I guess I had never placed much thought into linguistics itself. The relationship of linguistics, information, and technology, have been presented to me through the duration of this course in a way I could have never fathomed.
The essence of the biggest lesson I have taken from this class is this: information, in both linguistics and technology, is not a creation of this current digital age. There are decades and centuries behind us of this coexisting relationship. I had personally been clueless of this, just listening to the elders that talked down to my fellow screen-addicted peers, saying that this was only a product of our generation. Looking at Walden alone opened my eyes to this, especially when I had to dig to try to make connections to our class. I remember being given that very task, sitting there thinking, “What? Walden is the polar opposite of all the things we do in class, there’s no way to make a meaningful connection.” But as I began to dig, the puzzle pieces started to connect as I realized the influence of that relationship was so heavily presented in Walden, written over 100 years ago. To continue on, I think it’s worthwhile to not only look for this everlasting relationship, as our current technology continues to grow and boom. As a future teacher, teaching to make meaningful connections between text and our world around us is a key point of literature itself. I think it will be important to give these sorts of challenges to open students eyes to all the relationships and connections around us.
Technically, one of my favorite hands-on programs I have learned is being able to utilize atom. As I journal in it everyday, and maneuver the wonders of plain text, I can’t help but think of the long-term use. While I move forward in my teaching career, knowing how to use a program like atom to be able to save text in different formats, makes every future worksheet, e-journal, and lesson plan easier and more efficient to do on a computer. Not to mention, this is a skill I could implement with upper elementary students. Especially if digital technology continues at the rapid rate it does, skills like markdown and plain text will only become more handy. Having an understanding for a deeper use of the technology we use daily, makes me more versatile in the classroom.
Just last week, when I applied for a job at a local library, I wrote in the special skills box that I was currently taking this class that was teaching me about metadata and encoding. I was already comfortable in the humanities, but now finding ease in my new computer knowledge, makes my skill set more functional and resourceful than ever. I’m glad to not just know the surface level function of these machines, but be able to navigate my machine in relation to my studies, and even far beyond those.