First of all, as you can see above, I have added a countdown timer to this blog and it is counting down until 4pm April 21st, 2011.  This date is very important for all of us in this class right now...it is the exact time that we will be done our lives as students and will start our lives as professionals (hopefully).  April 21st is our last day of our last block of practicum!  After then, we will no longer be students (unless you want to come back for some reason...but who wants that??)

Secondly, I have another video for you this week.  This one was sent to me by my mother.  She knows that both my sister and I have blackberries, but would have no idea how to use them.  A few years ago when she got her own regular cell phone, my sister Sarah and I had to show her how to text.  She didn't really like the idea of t9 because it confused her, and the abc option took too much time and effort.  Unfortunately for us, we also showed her the "canned responses" option, and haven't since received a text message not found in that list.  "Yes" "No"  "I'll be there in 15" etc.  

Please watch, and enjoy!

After watching this video, I started this think of all of the "tech" text that we use when talking about computers, systems, the internet etc.  Growing up in this culture, I know that a fruit and a phone are very different things that just happen to share the same name.  (I had never heard of the term "dongle", but after looking it up, I read that it is a small stick with an USB-end that is a bit bigger than most USB-sticks, and it gives you mobile internet without being connected to a wireless or wired network.)  I tried to imagine myself as an EAL student who wouldn't understand that 2 completely different items would have the same word.  Imagine the problems and the confusion they could have with this?  I also imagined myelf as one of these two older men, confused about the technology discourse as much as I would be confused by the technology itself.  So many of the words that we use to describe very specific parts of a computer, equipment, procedures etc. realted to technology are everyday, normal words found in the English dictionary.  Even if you had wanted to find out the difinition of these tech words, you would have to search in a very newly written dictionary.  If that didn't work, one could always do a search online -where you can write in extra words to give the phrase/word in question some context.  However, this also requires the knowledge of the internet and a computer or phone to access the internet. 

This also made me wonder:
Are these terms used wold-wide, and what are these things called in other languages?  Did the Russians /Czecks/Spanish etc. make up completely new words to describe a "thumb drive" or a "mouse", or did they just use words already in their vocabulary to name these technologies?  Did they accept the English term and just say it with an accent? hmm...




This picture doesn't really go with the topic of my blog this week, but felt that it was worth looking at:




(For a larger sized picture, go to http://leakyslut.com/?p=1441&ref=nf and click on the bar above the picture to resize it to it's original.)