For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

What’s a modern convenience or technology that I’m thankful for?

Let me count the ways… I’m writing this response on my iPad Pro while enjoying an IPA at a local pub (Tenaya Creek Brewery). I got “into tech” in the late 1980s because I wanted a better way to write than my old manual typewriter. Funnily enough, at the time I was working for Pacific Bell and their technology was just then transitioning from electro-mechanical switches to electronic switches, which helped me learn how to troubleshoot tech problems while at the same time my job was eventually eliminated because electronic switches required far less personnel to maintain. Ack. But it opened up a whole new world to me where I saw myself as an analytical problem solver and developed that part of myself, whereas I’d previously tended to define myself in terms of my writing and other artistic endeavors. Yay, tech. 

As I mentioned in my last post, I also have medical technologies to thank for still being here, still being able to walk and still being able to see. Specifically, being able to get a long series of IVIg infusions helped repair my body fight an auto-immune illness (CIDP) that had caused my own antibodies to attack the nerves in my legs back in 2012. More recently I’ve been getting injections in my right eye to counter my diabetic retinopathy that was untreatable not even a decade ago. And lest we forget, I had access to the COVID vaccines as soon as they were available which made my work as a public school educator a little less of a threat to my life. The fact that I never “came down” with the virus, at least to any detectable extent, isn’t nothing. To be clear, I feel like I dodged a bullet, especially because I had students who had family members (like a parent!) die. Having gone through what I went through a decade ago (with CIDP) and losing my oldest sister from the same illness, I am thankful that the medical professionals around me did their thing and I got better. At the same time, if you read the last post, I have to be honest that I do tend to drift toward being too complacent until something almost literally smacks me in the face (or eyes…). Yikes. Yay, medical tech.

In my experiences as an educator, I’ve met professors at UNLV who are proud that they’ve shut down online programs because “face to face teaching is better.” Yeah, if you can afford the time or expense. Ugh. They take advantage of having access to their research in ways that wasn’t possible before, but they can’t see that their students are moving in the same direction and more and more are seeing that school is unnecessary to be successful in the world. Education should be leading the way when it comes to technology use, but that’s just not the case. There are lots of on-ground outliers using tech in innovative ways despite the backward culture they’re working in. And there are some who confuse whatever the latest tech trend, like A.I. and ChatGPT, for real learning. They confuse the novelty of doing something different for really changing the practice of education for the better.

I’m thankful that I was able to get my master’s degree and work on a doctorate in a hybrid online program that recognized the necessity of learning as a sociological/community process while adapting virtual learning environments as they were being developed. Sadly some institutions thought that they could get away with posting PDFs and videos behind a paywall and have huge classes managed by interns or low paid managers, and that could pass as “online education.” My experiences of online education gave me more access to my professors and classmates,  in situ, where I was at as I was doing the job I was studying for. Technology being used by smart educators (and administrators) did that. Yay ed tech!