Thoughts on technology in general

Today we had a chat session in which we had to discuss the role of CALL (computer assisted language learning) and the changes it has undergone throughout history. When I was reading the articles for this assignment, it made me think about how people in the younger generation seem to take technology for granted. I remember growing up with an Apple IIc at home and an Atari 800 in the classroom. The Apple II GS was the fancy schmancy machine that everyone drooled over at the time.

Anyway, I never really thought about how heavily computers had been studied in the context of learning a language. Some of the readings seemed a bit contrived or nitpicky in terms of their nomenclature and I had trouble discerning between the authors being researchers and the authors simply being unfamiliar with the technology they were studying because many of these people likely did not grow up with technology in their lives as we know it now. So reading about theory X and hypothesis Y seemed a bit strange for me simply because I had never really thought about technology in that context before.

In other news, here are a few other links you might be interested in. For starters, I really love politics and spend several hours a day perusing various news and political sites. I maintain a political blog that I started almost a year ago. It's called The 7-10 and has really become a labor of love. My goal is to have that blog give me a bit of name recognition so that eventually I could be called upon to provide freelance political analysis and commentary before ultimately getting hired by CNN or MSNBC.

Some of my favorite political links are National Journal and MSNBC's First Read. You can access other good political links at my blog.