Blog #4: Connecting to Me

So far a lot of the information that we have covered has been a very good refresher for me. I started college as a telecommunications major, so a lot of the information that we are viewing is not foreign knowledge to me. It is really nice to see how much some of the technologies have changed, even over the past six years. A lot of the stuff that we are working with now is much more user friendly than the programs that I worked on in the past.

The information and programs that were are covering are very helpful for my educational future. As a technology education instructor, there are many classes taught in the high school that are toned down versions of this class. A lot of the content that we are covering is giving me really cool ideas that I could research and possibly implement into a new course at our school. Our district has had the same traditional programs for years and I believe a Web 2.0 based offering would spark the student imagination and provide them with a sense of what they will be facing in the very near future.

What would I lose?

Currently I am in the process of transferring all of my files onto an external hard drive. I pretty much my whole life story on my computers, yes computers, I have four of them. Now common sense would have me using one and storing all information in one location, but I am of the new generation and like doing things the hard way. Knock on wood, I don't have any files really backed up on my network drives at school. If the whole system was to go out, I would lose a lot of my information. Fortunately, two of my three classes I teach are directly off Blackboard so all of the information (files and presentations) are stored on the Internet. I have been delaying for a long time to get an external hard drive, but I finally have one sitting on my desk. Now I just need to get going on transferring all the data.

My life would go south very fast if I was to lose this information. I am not really scared about my personal life, because I don't store a lot of documents from my personal life on the computer. As for my professional life, hours upon hours would be spent on rehatching a lot of the curriculum that I have already put a lot of leg work into as well as numerous hours trying to rehatch proposals and grants that I have been in the process of writing. I think storage of informaiton is something that has not been preached to us enough because nobody thinks the inevitable will happen. Hopefully, if that inevitable happens to me, it will hold off until the summer so I can have everything backed up.

Even backing up on an external hard drive is not enough. When I was in High School, I burnt through two external hard drives. While technologies have improved greatly since then, there is still the possibility of the hard drives frying. I think individuals also need to back up burned DVD's with all the information on their desktop, possibly even a couple times.

The Future of Macintosh and Windows

Well first off I am not very good at predicting the future and I don't think that many of us are. How many of us saw the world going from the "Zac Morris" cellphone, to the touchscreen IPhone's and Blackberry's. I think the incredible gains that we have made over the past 10-20 years will go down as some of the most important in technological history.

With that said, my vague predicting abilities see companies like Apple and Windows beginning to change their course of directions. For years, these companies have been dominators in the industry and provided us with everything we need in simple packeted programs and packages. These days, the trend is starting to change because I believe that our world is demanding the technology industry to keep finding more innovations. Take Microsoft Office for instance; Google and other online programs have created word processing, excel format, and presentation programs that individuals can use for free. As costs continue to be more and more of an issue for districts and companies, I believe that organizations will have to switch over to these free based software programs. I don't see Microsoft being able to market their software programs to individuals when people can go out and use somewhat the same program on the Internet.

I also see Google becoming even more of a dominate force in all technology. I have heard rumblings of a program that Google is working on that is suppose to be the end all of be all for technology programs. I have not really done any research into this new program, but I have heard in technology magazines that it is going to change the way that everyone will do personal computing.

Well I thought that the MotorRazr phone was the greatest thing that could be created until Apple came out with the revolutionizing IPhone. I will make a bold prediction that in the very near future, individuals will not be owning computers, they will be using their IPhone's and Blackberry's to run our world. Scary INDEED.