#7 Technology

Taking part in this Learning 2.0 really does make you think about the rapid changes in technolgy in our lifetime.

The process of creating and using photographs of Aden today is so different to the process my father used when taking photos of me as a young child.
Now it is possible to take lots of colour photographs of Aden on a digital camera, to check straight away that you have some good pictures, upload them on to a computer and manipulate them if you wish (change colour, lighting, crop etc), use some of the technology that I have been experimenting with here to create works of art (create frames etc), print out as many individually as you want on photographic paper, insert them into a document and print out, email some to relatives on the other side of the world in minutes, download some to your blog so the whole world can see them!

When I was a child my father was interested in photography, but he took black & white photographs of me with his Ilford camera and developed them with photographic chemicals and a stopwatch timer in his darkroom, which was actually the linen cupboard in the hallway of our house! He could only process a few at a time, but everyone thought it was great that he was able to make some into slightly enlarged photos (postcard size) and even do a little cropping of backgrounds. Relatives overseas had to wait for the postman to deliver a photo or two in a letter from Australia.

I have also been thinking about the means we have today of creating a newsletter or brochure with a computer, the right software, and resources available on the Internet - including variations of layouts and fonts, inclusion of photographs and graphics, printed out or online etc. We are already using some of this technology to promote our library services and resources and there are amazing possibilites opening up for the future.

In my earlier working days the process was out of a different world!
I was also the newsletter editor for my bushwalking club and in order to produce the monthly newsletter I had to type all the articles on to wax stencil sheets on a big old manual typewriter, with no changes of font, graphics or pictures possible, and little variation in layout. If you made a typing mistake with stencils you had to paint over it with a solution like nail varnish, wait for it to dry and then try to line the word up again in the typewriter in order to type the correction over the top. Too many mistakes and the wax stencil would start to break up! For printing, the stencil sheet had to be wrapped around the printing drum of the gestetner duplicating machine (trying not to crease it in the process - that would cause wavy lines to print out on the page along the crease lines). A few turns of the drum would print out a test page and then you could turn the power on and let it run to print your copies (one sided of course, only black ink, and on rough duplicator paper). There was a limit to the number of copies you could get off one stencil sheet before it started to disintegrate on the drum. This was only in the early 1980's, before widespread use of computers or photocopiers.