I made my second trip to Waverly-Shell Rock Junior High today to speak to their 7th graders about technology in the workplace.

During my last trip in October, we talked a lot about technology being part of a life long passion for learning. Technology will always be changing, and if you aren’t prepared to always be learning, you’re going to run into problems in the workplace.

Today I focused more on accessibility, mostly because the quality of consumer technology has impressed me lately.  I break the students up into groups and tell them to brainstorm technology used in fields like medicine, law enforcement and education. Their first answers normally include the  high-end, specialized equipment.

But, it’s surprising how much of my job, and many others are impacted or even improved by things we can buy at a large super center or basic electronics store.

Instead of using a live truck that takes lots of training and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can live stream from my cell phone in a matter of seconds. Is the quality the same? No. But, it could be in the near future.

I think looking at existing technology and finding applications in our own field is just as important and inventing new, specialized technology.

Thank you 7th graders for your thoughtful answers and insight during our brainstorming today. Hopefully you learned as much from me as I did from you!

Posted under Education, Web/Tech

If you had asked me this morning how long YouTube has been around, I would have guessed maybe 7 or 8 years, and I would have been wrong.

Yesterday was YouTube’s 5th birthday! And it’s been a crazy 5 years. Like Google and Facebook, YouTube has morphed from a noun to a verb (YouTube it!), and arguably the number one source for video online.

I think people have connected with the site because YouTube provides us the opportunity to share our lives – videos of our cat, a rant about an ex, or an air guitar solo. And more recently it gives us the chance to inform and interact, even hosting a viewer guided interview with President Obama.

Mashable argues that an early adoption of Flash and lenient policies helped YouTube dominate in a world of video start-ups.

You can argue and philosophize about it. All I know is when I’m looking for an awesome 80′s video like this KWWL promo, I know where I’m going.

Posted under Web/Tech

I am generally a problem solver. I enjoy a challenge that requires a creative solution. Taking all of the pieces I have at my disposal, analyzing the abilities of each one and figuring out how they can work together to achieve a goal.

I get it from my dad. He is the king of creative solutions. It may not always look pretty, but he can always find a part, or invent one, that will make it work.

But even those that enjoy a good puzzle have their limits – and the most frustrating problems tend to come from technology. Mostly this stems from something not doing what I expect it to be able to do.

For the last week, I have been trying to solve a problem. I’ve tried different cords, different computers, different settings, different programs. I’ve changed every variable I can think of in a process that, in theory, should easily work. And that’s when I hit that frustration wall. I just knew that it was supposed to work, but I had reached the point where it wasn’t a matter of putting the pieces in the right order, I simply didn’t have the knowledge I needed to make it work.

That’s the most frustrating part of technology for me. I’m mostly self taught, and despite the fact that I spend almost every waking moment connected to some form of machine, there is still so much that I don’t understand. And one unchecked box can drive me to edge of sanity. That point where you start to feel fatigued both mentally and physically, wanting to throw something across the room and wishing you could just walk away and not let a box made of plastic and metal make you feel completely incompetent.

And then you have that spark, you finally see something that triggers an idea. Sometimes it leads you right back to hopelessness, but every once in a while, it works – like nothing was ever wrong. And suddenly you feel like the smartest person in the entire world, until the next frustration comes along.

There are so many things you can say this about, but it is truly a love/hate relationship between me and the machines. They make me want to pull my hair out, and I blame them for my 3 gray hairs, but I can’t imagine my life without them.

Posted under Web/Tech