Community and Technology

What a great event our PAC put on this past Friday night.  Our Family Dance was a great success with many of our families coming out to enjoy an evening at the school.  At one point during the evening I was talking to a couple of our parents about the incredible advances in technology that have happened over the past few years and how easy that technology is to use.  We were looking at the source of our music for the evening, which included an iPod Touch and an iPhone hooked up to our school stereo system.  We marvelled at the idea of having so much music at our fingertips in such small containers.  As we were talking a student came up and requested a song from her iPod Nano, but the connection was different from what we were using.  No problem, we grabbed a MacBook from our lab and plugged the iPod into that and then patched the MacBook into the stereo system: instant playlist and another 250 songs at our disposal.  A little later, another student came up and requested a song that was not on any of the three players we were using.  Again no problem, out came two more iPhones from the parents I was talking with, we quickly found the requested song and had it playing.

I find this fascinating in part because of the incredible technology available at our finger tips, but also because of the ability the technology has to bring our community together.  This year our PAC has made a purposeful decision to create some "no-cost" events for our families to come out and enjoy.  In this case, utilizing the technology allowed people to have fun, enjoy a wide range of music, and easily accomplish the task by ourselves, without having to hire someone to come in and do it for us.  Truth be told, it wasn't really the technology that did this as much as it was a hard working group of parents, but the point is that the technology allowed for it to happen.   We often hear stories in the media and the lament of many, that technology is causing us to lose connection with one another.  Many of our children prefer alternatives such as texting, tweeting, or even blogging, to face-to-face contact.  I don't think this makes us less social, in fact I think it helps us to be more social, creating greater opportunities to connect with friends over bigger distances.  The technology that so often seems to push us apart can also be responsible for bringing us together.  Of course, the important lessons still have to be how to play nice and get along with others, whether in person or on-line.

Thanks to our PAC for organizing this event and bringing us together.  In the end, it is still the people involved that make a community what it is.  Technology is only a tool that helps us, it is not what creates it.