Teaching Tech

Teaching and learning are necessary compatriots, and I’m excited to learn alongside our group’s Learning 2.0 program participants at 4LCS. While I see my role as more of a program facilitator than teacher, I recognize how this program potentially catalyzes greater understanding of various tech tools, in part because of peer-to-peer and collaborative learning opportunities.

Also, I’m thrilled to have a justifiable excuse to play with tech tools like Zotero and Instapaper. Instapaper is shaping up to be my new favorite. Despite its seeming innocuousness and lack of tagging or labeling conventions, it presents information junkies like me with something more useful: a single source for myriad pages of variegated content from everywhere and all wheres to retrieve and read later. This simple concept allows users to gather and store articles, tweets, posts, and links, while otherwise working online without fear of falling down the Facebook rabbit hole to realize another hour has passed. Freedom, indeed.

This attitude appears to be the source of my hesitation to embrace too many “emerging” technologies. Balance is key, and every so often I need to look people in the eye without twitching from staring at a screen all day. Purposeful and meaningful tech appropriation allows me to catalyze new learning, and engages me to consider new ways of thinking about design and best practices in meeting user needs.