Science Fiction No More
Posted by Pamela Gustafson on May 5th, 2009
Online college education has opened a whole new world for me. It has helped me to achieve status as a knowledgeable 21st century teacher, and people who I work with look to me for answers about online education and technology integration. Many of the new teachers in middle school education have the tech skills that I have, but they are not yet able to apply their skills as effectively. The experience with 20th century teaching and students combined with my 21st century tech skills have served me well.
Since I am near retirement, my future job prospects are probably different from the normal 22-year-old college graduate. I want to work part time from home, and I think the online training will be helpful. I do know that online teaching jobs at the middle school level are scarce, and the few that are open are highly competitive. It is an emerging market, but I am confident of my readiness for new markets.
It will be highly unlikely that I take a class that isn’t online. I am used to scheduling my course work on my own terms. Online education allows me to work full time, tutor students part-time, and schedule my assignments on my own terms. I do operate from the vantage point of my first degree in 1975 being entirely on-site. At that point in time, computers and the online environment were merely science fiction.
I remember reading a fictionalized story about a man who programmed a computer (which took up a whole room) to write poetry for his wife. The computer ended up falling in love with the man’s wife and obsessively blew its circuits writing poetry. The story ended with the computer giving the man enough poems for a thousand years. Another science fiction story was about a man who discovered how to multiply in his head after years of delegating this tasks to computers. People had forgotten this skill, which I still teach today, after allowing computers to multiply for them.
Although these particular science fiction stories do not completely match the evolution of computers and their online connections, it is interesting to think about how I was educated in 1975 and how I am educated now. My education today would have been a great science fiction story in 1975.
