I feel as if I’m in a bizarre alternate universe!
Here I am at a social media workshop and instead of writing notes we are typing on our laptops and taking photos of the notes on the screen on the wall. These photos I will download later from my phone to my laptop and then put into a program together with my other typed notes. Which will then be a true account of the information I have been taught here today.
Incomprehensible to the child I was at school, or the adult studying as a ‘mature age’ student.
This is the first time I have been to a workshop where I have been told to get on Facebook while the facilitator was talking! (I will repeat, just to clarify, that it was a social media bootcamp.)
How things have changed!
Will my grandchildren be able to comprehend what it was like for me at school?
Will they understand how in primary school I sat at a school desk with a hole in it for an inkwell? I dipped a thing like a pencil with a metal nib on the end into an inkwell, which held the liquid ink.
Then with that ink I had to write letters on the page in ‘running writing’ by following exactly the spacing on the slope card underneath. I had to be very careful that I did not smudge the ink before it dried on the page (we got into big trouble if it was smudged, left handers had a really tough time)
Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that for very long before biros came on the scene. The lack of mess was most welcome, by us, the teachers and our mothers who had to clean our uniforms. Everyone was supposed to write the same. Individuality was not encouraged; in fact it was punished.
Mind you after the workshop today my mind was reeling from the information that was flying around that room. So different from the learning style that I grew up with.
But a style so much better for my brain to cope with.
When I was well into my forties I discovered that I am a visual learner. Once I changed the way I studied to suit the way my brain absorbs and retains information I realised that I wasn’t as ‘dumb’ as I had previously thought (or maybe it had been inferred).
How things have changed!
