Early one morning a few years ago, I stopped to share yoga conversation with two young women out practising their yoga on the beach. They asked me to take a photo of them with their camera. I looked at that digital camera and couldn’t even work out where to look into it, let alone take the shot. At that moment I realised that the technology bus was at my stop and if I didn’t keep clambering on board, it would drive off without me.
I promptly began to raise my game, but that bus just keeps accelerating and I and many others stagger along behind in a vague electronic dust cloud. This month, just when I was feeling reasonably pleased with how we had developed this blog, Time Magazine produced its fascinating June 5 article on Twitter technology . Now I have to consider whether we should be twittering instead. Answer? I think not. But that same week I attended a session on the creative use of interactive whiteboards in training and discovered that it wasn’t very hard to learn how to use them. So that’d be good, but where to find the time and the ideas?
Talking on these issues with fellow baby boomers we found that collectively we were using quite a range of technologies, even if most of us hadn’t heard of most of them! For example, Dim Dim was complete news for me.
Our use of technology, (or even non-use!) forms part of our personal presence. So my question is: How on earth do we keep up enough to get the best from the technology without getting bogged down? I have searched that question on the web and not come up with many useful answers. I’d be very pleased if you have some good ideas. Here are my own tips so far:
- Keep a technology question book and write down absolutely every technology problem as it occurs to you. Every How do you..?’ and ‘I am frustrated that I can’t…’ and ‘I wish I could..’. Then when the right opportunity comes along, asit will, ask the questions and write down the answers. I find that has helped lots. The tip really came from my wonderful mentor coach Leah McLean, at Working Solo. Her business in her words – ‘Demystifies design and technology for small business women’.
- Find a good techo-guru, like Leah McLean, who understands your unique and relatively simple technology needs and also understands the technology, but is not hypnotised by it .
- Talk to lots of different people about what you are doing and learning in technology and you will be surprised at the ideas and experiences the discussion generates. This third tip arose from the weekend discussions. The technology writers blog: I’d Rather Be Writing says that writers should keep up with the rate of change by writing about it. Maybe talking about it is the answer for the rank amateur.
- Fourthly, talk with any of the younger generation you can access, but make sure you have some kind of power over them first, so they don’t subject you to copious eye rolling. I trade my son’s access to my car for non-judgemental input on technology.
All tips on this very gratefully received!
Thanks for the mention. Although I had this virtual chat nearly two years ago, the issue remains the same: how do we keep up with the rapidly changing pace of technology. I’m currently trying to learn Illustrator and Flash. One of my colleagues recommended doing a tutorial a week. If you pace yourself, you can keep learning. If you try to do everything at once, it overwhelms you.