*BI=Before Internet

Our collective memories get so easily altered with the advent and use of new technologies. It’s so common amongst people to resist new tech and for teachers to insist that what they are used to is ‘good enough’ and ‘didn’t they learn without this new tech just fine’ themselves?

Then, somehow, the new tech catches on and it is as if resistance had never existed!!!

It’s good for us, once in a while, to look back and think about how quickly what we took for granted for a long time, changed so very quickly over just the past two decades really!!! It’s astonishing! And then even more changed, in major leaps and bounds due to the pandemic!

I was inspired to ask the question below by a colleague who put it out on twitter and waited for answers – I thought it would be fun to share our collective memories.

I loved all the responses and have embedded a few of them in this post to remind you of how quick the changes have been in the last very few decades. Here is my tweet:

Since I wrote this short post, I found out that the question has been asked times innumerable already; so what else is new these days? Not much…

But the answers below are from online colleagues and friends, my very own PLN, so to speak….so here goes:

I had a case of stuck cassette tape happen to me in my final external teaching observation for teaching Diploma – the RSA DTEFLA  if anyone remembers that one!!!

There goes another unrecognisable to some anachronism! Phil Keegan has one of those as well, I know 🙂

I still have all those OHTS, Marjorie, though I am being hounded by my colleagues at CELT to go through those binders and chuck them away!

I recently threw only three of them away – that’s how difficult it is to pry old material out of my hands!

We also still have an overhead projector hidden somewhere in the school; a young trainee saw it in the storeroom the other day and, in a mystified tone asked “What does this thing do?” 🙂

Oh, God, David and Bruno!!! Those comments do bring back memories !!!! David, I hope your recent blog post on the LT SIG blog has some connection to this thread – or great minds…..

Yes, Sylvia – it’s so hard to remember further back than our first mobile phone, clunky and ugly though it may have been; the miracle of it so quickly erased memories of phone booths and pay phones!

Here is the picture that Julie sent to remind us how Google searches have changes our lives and the way we learn and share knowledge these days!

Time runs so fast these days and I don’t know if it’s because I am getting older or because all these new technologies make it seem as if it is moving faster, replacing old memories with new ones at speeds inconceivable just a few decades ago.

But anyway, I am glad I got chance to live through these major changes. I love it that I felt – and still feel – the excitement of novel applications and tools! And much more!

I am indebted to technology

Technology has opened up a new world in which I feel connected not just to a few colleagues but to hundreds upon hundreds of them.

I am indebted to technology for the wonderful people around the world that I can now call friends.

Some people claim you cannot develop true friendships with more than a small number of people in your life and use this as a reason to resist being connected in social media.

I think most of us have grown out of that naive fallacy that social media and technology are there for us to make friends! But without them we might never get to converse and interact with really important people in our lives.

So thank you to all of  you on my PLN who responded. May you live and prosper in interesting times.