Stephen Asunka

My (Techno-)Biography

I first came into contact with digital technologies during my undergraduate student days in Ghana (in the early 1990s) when my department first acquired an electronic typewriter/word processor. I was fascinated by the fact that one could type text, see it appear on a screen (one line at a time), and have the opportunity to correct any mistakes before printing it out. Hitherto we were using manual typewriters, and any errors made had to be corrected with white correction fluid. At worst one had to discard what had been typed already and start all over again. I therefore saw the electronic typewriter as a great relief (even though the text could not be saved for future use), and spent several hours trying to learn its features. Since then I have not looked back.

I came to the United States in 1992 for an MS course in Chemistry at UCLA, and by the time I was returning to Ghana (1993), I made sure that I had acquired a word processor that had the extra feature of saving on a floppy diskette!

Back in Ghana, I was involved in teaching chemistry at the college level, and whilst most of my colleagues were writing their reports etc. either by hand or with manual typewriters, mine was always neatly processed (justified lines, bold, italics, underline etc), to the amazement of all. It was therefore not surprising that when my department first acquired an IBM computer, I was seen as the person who could make effective use of it; hence I was appointed a technology coordinator. By this time however, I had very little knowledge of how computers work, but I was not honest enough to let my colleagues know this. To save myself from any embarrassment, I took some crash courses in computing (on the quite), and within a short time I was fairly conversant with creating databases, generating reports etc.

With the coming of the internet and WWW, I was deeply involved in getting my university online (www.ug.edu.gh), but there was still a lot of work to be done, especially in the area of applying these technologies in education. As I was assuming a leadership role in all these technological activities, I decided upgrade my knowledge by coming to TC in the fall of 2001 for the MA degree in Instructional Technology and Media. My experience at TC was highly rewarding and upon returning to Ghana in 2003, I contributed to the setting up of an ICT center to train all categories of persons in the use of technology to enhance their activities.

I am now back to the Ed.D program in Instructional Technology at TC. Being interested in distance learning, I am quite knowledgeable in web design and programming but blogs, wikis, RSS feeds etc. are fairly new to me. I therefore hope that by the end of this course in Social Software Affordances, I would have developed competency in the use of social software in addressing diverse social issues.

posted by Steve @ 12:14 PM