AED 811: Fictionally Speculate: Year 2035

In the twentieth century, literacy and social skills were necessary to fully access and move upwards within the world, specifically within your own education and as an educator. In the twenty-first century culture, a new literacy in technology pulls people through their past values and into a new set of structures for interaction and education. I remember my mother in technology’s adolescence not being able to figure out where the web address goes [she had two masters degrees]; I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t obvious because my perspective was so different. A computer became a permanent fixture in my childhood home when I was six years old while my parents were using one for the first time at age 43. As new generations are born into this and raised with a device [gripped tightly] in their hands and the screen’s blue luminescence forever falling across their faces, it becomes an innate adaption to human existence, interaction, and ways of learning while older [archaic when possessed alone] skills have been absorbed into a fresh technological scope.

In the year 2014 like the Times piece on the Apple watch, I began teaching in the public schools of Pittsburgh ,PA. I would use an Elmo to demonstrate, a chalkboard to write on, a wall to project images upon and my smart phone to track time. It is now 2035, and I am now [45] about the age my parents were when they first used a computer. I have been teaching art for twenty years now, and slowly, traditional education was taken out of a physical classroom and no longer exists, unless you pay for a traditional private option. Our computers and devices now connect us to the entire public education system without having to leave our homes. Every child in the nation is entitled to a functional electronic learning computer and wifi to access the world of [e]learning. In my online classroom, I deliver information to my students through video podcast lectures that are based in a “sketchcast” style. I used to teach the same lesson over and over again with different sets of children; I now get to convey my lesson through an artfully produced video with my voice, drawings, and written notes that students can pause, rewind, and replay. Students produce works of art using apps like iBrush technology to create drawings and paintings on their device that take up only the space in “the cloud.” Media-based art units have students repurpose and edit existing pictures and videos from our visual culture using photo and video editing applications. Our society has done incredible things to conserve our consumable resources by changing the way we produce educational artifacts.

The contemporary student gets to participate in class through interactive games and interfaces online that pertain to developing artistic ideas/stories and collaborating to critique their emerging works; socializing, designing, and playing is fostered through the use of SecondLife within my art classroom. I am fortunate to oversee these interactions and provide students with direction when they find themselves at a standstill. With the fun and interactive styles of teaching and learning we have adapted with the changing technologocal age, students get to interact engagingly and have self-driven autonomy within their education in a way children haven't in past generations. This has positively affected attendance, rates of graduation, and overall academic performance. Art exhibitions are no longer a tedious process that occupy physical space or time; students use social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to share their artwork with their classmates and the [entire] world. Technology has taken artistic viewing and sharing from a small private opportunity to a public affair where makers become consumers of art and the viewers themselves create and share their inspirations and reactions.

The students I teach don’t just “naturally” use an iPad or use social media to update their friends about what’s going on in their lives; these devices and the lives they lead are entirely intertwined. Socially and stylistically through technology, young individuals have a platform to develop their entire life’s identity and purpose. Their conscious beings are dictated by how they react and express political and social values within the new mediums of social media. These techies [those possessed with technological savvy] track every second of their physical location and all of their interactions with the world including the food they consume and the things they smile and frown at. Techies track each footstep they take, test their pulses, check their stress levels, and give input on Google as they ask you to rate every experience you have and place you go to. Humans in the age of contemporary technology no longer worry about who has their data and what it's being used for. This is the age where we literally become one with our technology. Learning in an online classroom is just one piece of the technologically-woven puzzle of human existence in the age of technology [Year 2035].