Poet Ponders the Digital

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

English: Image of a Viking Modular SATA SSD in an MO-297 form factor (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 5, 2014 Deadline June 2014 Issue The Need for Speed: Get More Done, Faster Spinning beach balls, hourglasses, hula hoops and progress bars signify lost time and frustration. Watching icons bounce in a dock or slowly populate a taskbar as software loads only adds to the annoyance of using a slow computer. As a tech consultant, “My computer is slow” might be the most common issue I hear. Often, the complaint is followed by a revealing explanation: the client has used a newer computer and realized how soon today’s cheetah is tomorrow’s snail. Systems start to “feel slow” compared to new computers after three to four years, and that assumes you buy mid-range to high-end hardware. If you buy an inexpensive computer, it feels “slow” much sooner. Do you need the fastest, latest and greatest computer? Or, do you need “fast enough” to get your work don...