My story ...
I’m Kelly (or Belle to my family). I grew up the youngest of three girls, in an immigrant multi-racial/bi-lingual home nestled in small town, farming country Australia. Our family was different to many of the families around and centered deep in community. From the Veterans, farmers and truckies my dad called mates, to the women, teachers, and fellow immigrants my mother organized with, our home was a melting pot of passionate conversations, mixed cultural ideals and community events.
After school, I took a year to work, earn money and gain the skills I needed to support myself financially through college. I moved to the city for college and during my second year I attended a talk delivered by a visiting American Professor. He shared about the future of the internet and how it would change how we learn, communicate and live. I had my first email address and was learning how to build databases in SQL and websites with HTML. It was difficult to connect to the stories and ideas he shared.
All the use examples were of North America not Australia, nor in any way connected to the immigrant family I’d learned with, the small town and rural farms I’d grown up on, or the coastal beach communities I’d come to love. Many of the innovators and entrepreneurs he shared about, their stories I could also not relate to. The focus was on the technologies they’d created, more so than for their impact on the learning, work, or peoples lives.
This made me curious about our stories – our lived experiences and the contexts in which we learn, work and live how they impact how we learn about, build and use the technologies that are being promised to improve our lives.
