New school year

Summer is winding down and school is approaching. Being the person that I am, I spent a fair amount of my summer within arm's reach of my HP laptop. While at my apartment in San Luis Obispo I had readily available wireless access to keep up on work with MITE, stay in touch with my family via email and talk to college friends with Facebook. When I was able to go home and it was too hot for frisbee we'd play games and get on YouTube with the Wii. On vacation I had my laptop and my acoustic guitar and spent nights tracking my summer writing.

With school less than 2 weeks away, however, it's almost time to say good bye to most of these habits. I won't be home nearly as often and with spotty wireless coverage anywhere but the library my email will sit unread until late each evening. With studying, reading assignments and homework the Wii will sit idle and my guitar won't be recorded again until winter break hits in December.

It seems a little odd to me, especially as a student at a Polytechnic school, that my 'many technologies' will go nearly unused during the school year. I am in a fairly computer-based major so I will have occasional assignments that require me to use Creative Suite and upload files to Blackboard, but note the word 'occasional'. In most cases that really means 'if you don't finish in class'.

This leads me to a question suggested to me by Ruth, do faculty want us or support us in using the technology we know so well? You would be hard pressed to find a college student that doesn't know how to shoot or do simple editing on digital photos, to organize a music library containing thousands of songs, to check email from a cell phone...we use technology nearly constantly. Socially and in terms of entertainment we're more productive and efficient than ever before, we can carry every song we've ever heard, make phone calls and surf the internet from our pocket.

With the first generation of true technology natives coming into place, do administrators and faculty understand what we're capable of'? I would love to hear from faculty, teachers, educators or anyone involved in learning, would you want to implement these technologies into learning?