6:07 pm Assignments
Hello to all of you brave souls interested in integrating technology! I’m Sam Haskins, a part of the Senior class and a lifelong tech-aficionado. Since before I was in middle school, I’ve been fascinated with the way that computers and gadgets work. Interactions between parts of computers and their environments has always been of special interest. I’ve used the internet since 1996 (though then the possibilities were only beginning to unfold), but I’ve only recently made the switch from dialup to always-on broadband internet.
I’m really excited to play around with Academics Manager and online document services. The biggest motivation these have for me is that I am a forgetful person: I constantly have trouble determining what I should do for homework and how far out project due date are, as well as often loosing floppy disks, USB drives, and physical copies of work. These two utilities hold the possibility of helping me make forgetfulness irrelevant. With sufficient teacher involvement, Academics Manager or other online class utilities can provide syllabuses, assignment details, or even handouts. Online document tools, like Google Docs make it impossible to misplace work and easy to track drafts. Plus, Google Docs gives group projects the possibility to become organized and easy to manage. In the past, group projects have been nothing but headaches and wasted time. The project’s I’ve done with Google Docs, however, have been streamlined and interesting. I look forward to helping incorporate it more officially into the school.
Dream projects of mine involve easily accessible data between all sorts of applications. I hope to someday work on designing a system, for a school or otherwise, where it doesn’t matter what kind of computer a person has, what software they run, what web sites they use. All the programs, sites, and machines would instead follow well defined standards that would allow everyone to interact with each other without knowing, or caring, what the other people are using. I envision all email clients having the same access to your official email, calendars that you can view in anything from Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook to a Palm Pilot to printed paper without any difficulties. I want to have networks that can be secure and well managed without the need for your computer to be managed by your organization. All of this is possible now, but difficult to set up and enforce. I hope that in the future, the companies that make the kind of technology that we use will work together more to make such integration the rule rather than the exception.
In my school-day, the technology I use is varied. At home, I use my desktop computer (which I assembled myself) and my laptop, a very small IBM model. My internet connection at home is Satellite, which hinders anything that requires instant reaction, like Skype, but makes web browsing much more bearable. At school, I have no classes where we normally use computers, but I use the Writing Lab and Library machines often.
I’m glad to be involved in this project. I look forward to see what we can do.
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