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Tech Bio

School days

After three years as a journalist, I decided to return to the classroom to pursue my master’s degree in English. I noticed my return to school included many more intersections with computers. It seems that our university had discovered technology in the short years I was away and soon every class was using Blackboard postings, online assignments, Web searches, and PowerPoint presentations. As in my undergraduate days, I found these technical interchanges pleasant because they occurred in a learning environment, a place where I expect to be questioning, unsure, and have always been okay with making mistakes in pursuit of new skills and knowledge.

My first full-time teaching position – serving as a journalism instructor and adviser to the same school newspaper where I had worked as a student–forced me to learn much more than I ever intended to know about networking, digital camera, PDFs, Fetch, and embedded fonts.

Once, to my horror, I was even instructed by a campus tech support worker to open the side of a computer and strike a button near the motherboard when a Macintosh G4 would not start up on our biggest production day.

To this day I do not know what I hit or what the problem was, but the machine started up and I was convinced I had some sort of divine healing power. There is no greater high for me than figuring out a situation in a computer environment that, for me, remains sometimes incomprehensible.

I purchased my first computer for myself in 2004. Before that I used ones at work or the old one I had from college at my home. When I decided to pursue my doctorate I felt a laptop was a must. Choosing the laptop was almost more difficult than choosing a graduate school. What model did I need, how much memory, what programs? I finally settled on a Mac iBook G4 – a throwback from my time in journalism and the computer family that makes me feel most at home. Yes, I am a MAC girl. Making this proclamation may be more daring than declaring a political affiliation or religious denomination in some circles. It is amazing, in a society seemingly allergic to commitment and loyalty, what ardent devotion computer users hold for either Macs or PCs. It’s the new party line division and seems to say as much about the users in question as how they vote or where they live.

My rocky journey with technology mirrors many of those of my students and colleagues and has taught me to value what we can learn about people and their literacies simply by attending to the sorts of technologies they use in their daily lives. This insight gave rise to my research interests regarding young women's use of social networking sites, blogging as scholarship and identity construction, and other new media issues involving pedagogy and scholarship. I hope that my own frustrations and successes with digital media will continue to inspire my work in the classroom and as a scholar.