Research Question or Something Close

My current interest is looking at how online communities have developed and/or furthered the movement to "go green." I will be looking at sources that discuss the dynamics of online communities and hope to find some sources that deal directly with online communities in relation to social movements. I think it would be interesting to discover whether any of the articles address how much "community" comes out of online communities.

My Life in Technology

The Beginning

I remember the Christmas my brothers got an Atari. I thought it was so cool...they could play games on the television! However, I had no interaction with it whatsoever; my brothers threatened my very life if I even breathed on the consul. Perhaps that started my lifelong aversion to gaming.

The VCR was a much bigger presence in my life. I loved being able to watch movies over and over. My families loved to watch movies, so our VCRs were always well used. Video rental storeswere popping up all over the place. I once picked out a video and my father told me we couldn't rent that one because it was a Betamax video and our machine was a VHS machine. I witnessed the original home viewing format war - now that belongs to DVD vs. Blu-ray.

The Middle
Computers have become a huge part of my life, professionally and personally, but memories of using a computer are sparse before college. According to my parents, I learned to read on a Mac at school, using a then, new phonics program. They said I was reading within a week, but I don't remember this. I must have used one for word processing in high school, but I cannot recall a specific time. It became more important in college where it was required to type papers. So it was in 1996 that I first used Word and really, that was my only concept of working with a computer for a long time.

It was during college (the undergraduate degree) that I experienced my first non-word processing application on a computer. I fumbled through Quark Xpress in a journalism

editing class. We had to produce a one-sheet tabloid paper and more important than the finished product (it wasn’t that great), this was the first time I dived into a software and learned how to use it myself. It was a huge foundation for what I would end up doing for the rest of my life.

Personally, when I first started college, I was far away from home, far from all my friends, and it was difficult for me to make friends. Email made me feel better. As primitive as it was in 1996, it still allowed me to stay in touch with my friends. We all wrote back and forth about how school was harder than we thought, how it was strange to be away from home. Email was more than contacting professors and classmates (professionally, I think, people were still on the fence about it as communication at that time), it was a way to talk to friends, both far and near. I still have my first non-school email address. It has become my fallback email address, one where I send confirmations to what I buy, or the email I put in when I start an account somewhere, but I still have it.

The Rest (So Far)
Using my computer professionally and personally is still a major part of my life, and it has evolved with the changes technology and software have experienced.

While I was working on my Masters degree, software became very important to me. I made my first PowerPoint presentation (one of many). I no longer had to use Quark Xpress, I was able to use InDesign. I played my way to a working knowledge of Photoshop. I built websites with Dreamweaver. I tried Flash. I not only learned to use these, but I honestly became

interested in learning more. I paid attention when Adobe bought Macromedia and was excited about the possibilities. I read up on the differences in versions. My mentality was, why use a Word document, when you could use anything else.

Once I received my Masters degree and got a job as a Communications Coordinator, I was able to continue on the software path. I extensively used InDesign and Photoshop for all my projects and with each project I would try new techniques in each and I learned more and more about the capabilities of each program. It was a great accomplishment, learning more and learning it on my own.

On a personal front, I still continued to email as a way of keeping in touch with friends. I started using a Gmail account when it was still in Beta (when I needed an invitation to get an account). I started a blog and although there is talk that the blog is dead, I still have mine. I love my little blog; it's evolved just as much as I have.

Eventualy I became a social networker. I tried Friendster in 2003 (it was always so overloaded that it was hard to get on). I had a Facebook when I was getting my Master’s degree. I have a MySpace page. When I began looking for a job I consolidated my social networking memberships. I left Facebook (which, ironically, seemed boring at the time) and maintained MySpace. I have recently started Twittering and I’ve gone from MySpace back to Facebook (and to which I am addicted). All of these helped me keep in contact with friends, near and far.


Now I am able to bring all of this together and use it and study it in a new way. As an educator and researcher I am interested in how these different technologies and applications can work in the classroom. Students can work collaboratively through wikis. Students can keep a research journal on a blog. I hope to encourage students to dig into software like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and tell them it might be messy, but that’s how they are going to learn. Although I have been involved with some of these for more than ten years, they are still new in the education and research fields and really rich in terms of rhetoric and theory. I want to be apart of the wave that implements them in the classroom. That’s where I see my future - using all the tools in my box to their fullest capabilities.