I am taking part in the 23 things course so that I can see the depths of my ignorance.

I am a 56 year old Learning Assistant* in a Further Education college with students of all ages from 16 onwards.

 I read with interest and dismay that email is becoming old hat and post getting too expensive to use, so we must, even just to maintain the  service to our users, be aware of how people communicate and be able to reach them where they are, not where we think they are.

Now, I am not a gadgety or techy sort of person. Not anything like what is termed an ‘early adopter’. I have got a mobile phone and it is switched on and (usually) has a battery charge. However, it is for me to contact the world not the other way around.  And anyway it lives in my bag which is hung up in the hall at home and put away in my locker in work. Good luck with contacting me; I don’t know what the phone number is anyway. That is the sum of my personal gadgets.

Of course I use computers, I am using one now. I even have an ECDL. I use one every day at work and even at home. Sometimes. I am comfortable being an old-fashioned reading books and writing things down sort .

I am aware  that many others use their devices instead, I still think of them as phones but of course they are well past that point. They are the conduit of whole lives, fragile and precious and pretty much irreplaceable. So if that is where a lot of our users are then I think that we need to be there too. And I need to find out as much as I can about it.

So I am prepared to be amazed.

*  I am on the front line, if people are trying to flatter me they call me a para professional, this means I try to do the fancy stuff while issuing, returning and filling the printer.