Skype Session 16/10/2015 - With Paula Nottingham

Hello Everyone,

This Friday just gone, I had a group skype chat with Paula and a few other students on the course. To begin with Paula got us to introduce ourselves to the group and what we wanted to discuss during the skype session. For me I was still a little confused on Web 2.0 and that I was feeling still a little hesitant on professional communication. As Paula described it – ‘Everything in your life starts with a beginning, and at the beginning, the start is always wobbly but this is key, to the initiation to your professional development. All new things start with this’. I completely agree with her, as humans I believe that we are always trying to do our best. For me personally I always worry about not getting things right and that’s where my hesitation comes from. I just have to remember that making mistakes is a learning curve and when it does occur, to embrace the mistakes rather than think that I have failed.

Throughout the talk we discussed what web 2.0 was and how we are using professional communication everyday such as Facebook. From this conversation we ventured into the depths of how far technology as come over the years. We discussed all our different experiences with learning at school with technology and how different it is now. As I teach children, I find that they are so advanced with all the new technology that is coming out. But even though I am considered to have grown up in the technology advanced age group of children, I still struggle a lot with technology. I find that I am always being told- ‘You’re young! You should know how all this stuff works’. I agree to an extent. Yes I know the basics, yes I have the advantage of being taught about ICT (For windows) at school however, How can you define that as knowing ‘all’ about technology such as IT development, apple products and code writing, unless you studied in higher Education to do so? I find this assumption something that I have no control over. However, we assume that the younger generation is so advanced already with technology. We base this assumption off our own experiences. We haven’t sat down and conducted experiments, we are going off, what I, ourselves witness. Technology is so accessible in today’s modern age, is this the reason why younger generations are able to understand technology more then we can? And if so, is this the same outlook that older generations would have for my generation? 

 I did some research and found a study conducted by Alison Hillhouse from MTV Insights, she says ‘the 70 million millennials, or Generation Y, have been dubbed the entitled or me generation. Younger millennials, aged 13-17, are very different in outlook, planning and use of technology than 20-somethings’ (Post, 2015) as well as stating that the younger generation aged 13-17 are ‘’digital homesteaders, instead of digital pioneers. They have grown up with social media their entire life" (Post, 2015). This study represents that growing up with the advanced technology available is what give the younger generation the knowledge they have.

I mentioned earlier that my skills with technology are not the best, I have two circumstances that have occurred already just from using blogger.

1. I briefly mentioned this in an earlier post- Because of where I am living, my blogger search on google automatically came up with the address local to the U.A.E., this is absolutely what I thought would occur. However what I didn’t think would happen was it all being in Arabic! Starting the blog was nerving enough let alone not being able to understand anything on the page. I ended up having to use google translate copying and pasting until I found the English option.
2. After finally setting up my blog, I wanted to add some photos, as I am a visual person/learner. However every time I selected the photo and went to upload the photo, my computer froze! I tried a lot of different things to make my photos upload. Checking they weren’t too big a sized photo, checking it was JPEG but, nothing worked. When I spoke to my tech savvy boyfriend, he suggested trying a different web browser and it worked. So for future reference for any bloggers out there, don’t use internet explorer because the photos won’t upload. I now use Google Chrome.

These two incidents both show how unnatural the internet is to me, however I am learning. This course is definitely helping with that! I am becoming more aware of the options available on the internet to use for professional communication. After the skype session, I am definitely feeling more grounded on the topics of Web 2.0 and professional communication.

Please comment below if you would like, I would love to know if anyone else is having problems using blogger.

Thanks for reading,

Cassie V.