The Wonders of Technology (and a Change of Mind)

If I'm not mistaken, there has been an explosion in commucations, computer technology, online applications, and social networking within the past 17 years of internet. And if I'm also not mistaken, there's been an enormous surge in the amount of internet users.

So what did this mean for me? The internet, once i figured out how to use it properly, quickly became the time-consuming tools in my entire life. It became the enormous black hole i imagined it to be: Every day i would get sucked into it. I'd upload photos, IM my friends, play online games, compulsively check facebook, watch some obscure youtube video, or do whatever i could to waste time on the internet.

With that said, the idea of a school-based webpage simply intrigued to me. I thought it would just be simply amazing to have something like a Ning page or a Blog where all 30 members of Academy were socially interconnected. I thought it would be wonderful to have an online assignment I could access from any computer. No paperwork, no printer problems, and no troublesome gluesticks or sharpie markers. My work would simply appear online, so long as there WAS a reliable internet connection.

And so i had my hopes up for a year of smooth, efficient online homework. I thought the online work would be simple. But my mind changed as soon as i created my Ning account. I acutally needed an INVITATION in order to access the Glenbrook Academy Ning, and while this alone wasn't too difficult to manage, I somehow couldn't request my invitation. I couldn't join the Ning for some reason! Even when i did join and get my confirmation email, the Ning wouldn't recoqnize me as a member unless i accessed it directly from that email. But either way, it was probably just a small glitch (and it fixed itself).

So that was solved and out of the question, but to make matters worse, our homework soley depended on the existence of a web page. This was Mr. Allen's Academy Webpage. It would have been our light and salvation if we somehow glossed over that last bit of homework in our assignment notebooks. It would have been my official homework guide, had i not forgotten the site address and assumed that Mr. Allen would just tell us the assignments in class.

So I failed to check the posted homework. I forgot to check it, and even if i did, the internet on my computer was completely blown out. Dead. The internet had no connection, and that meant I wouldn't be able to even view the website.

So the whole "Ning-thing" just looked pretty dim for me. Even as of today, I have little faith in online-based assignments. Technology, in my opinion, makes things more complicated.