Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 19, 1994 TAG: 9407190028
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Paul Dellinger
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We probably have taken several such courses already, although we haven't called them that.
Our newspaper is into its third generation of computer systems, each one able to do more things but each one also more complicated to master. Each time, all of us who use them have to be brought up to speed anew. (When I started, they still were using manual typewriters.)
It is easier for some of us than for others.
One of the aforementioned computer-literate folks recently had visited the Blacksburg Public Library, and taken a look around at the patrons who were busily using the library's computers with ease and familiarity, as if they'd done so all their lives.
What she noticed mainly was that none of them was over 10 years old.
That's a phenomenon we have noticed in the newsroom, too. The younger reporters take to new computer systems with apparent ease. We older fogies usually take to them with apprehension.
Two of us in the bloom of late, rather than early, youth agreed that those under a certain age are born with a computer gene that evolution has not produced in the rest of us.
But age cannot be the entire answer. A Radford University faculty member not that much younger than I routinely roves through all kinds of computer networks. In fact, he used data from those networks to write an article on the U.S.-Russian joint space station initiative for a magazine. His deadline required him to submit the article before the news of the agreement had been officially announced. But there it was, all laid out in the Internet for those with talent enough to track it down.
In places like Pulaski County, the citizenry has supported the necessary funding to get computers in every classroom from kindergarten right up through high school. Those students, of course, all probably have that computer gene we mentioned and so take right to them.
Now it is necessary to make sure their teachers know more about computers than the students. The administrative staff wants to equip all teachers with their own laptop computers, so they can take them home, become familiar with them and prepare lessons on them.
Although details still remain to be worked out, the staff has looked at the idea of a cost-sharing plan that would give teachers a chance to buy their own computers at bargain prices.
Even I have my own computer at home, less sophisticated than the ones I use at work but with memory enough to play an occasional game of chess. It had patience enough to teach both our children to type, so they could bypass a semester of typing in school and devote that time to other subjects.
But it did become painfully obvious during last winter's ice storms that the most sophisticated computer is no better than a doorstop when the electricity is off.
That was when I dusted off my old manual typewriter and found that it still had a place in today's technological world.
Paul Dellinger is a staff writer in the Roanoke Times & World-News' New River Valley bureau.
by CNB