What is IT and why is it important?

What is IT?  What is what?  No, not what, IT!

So what is Information Technology?  Let's start with Technology.  Is Technology just anything electronic and gadgety?  Technology is applied science and applied engineering.

Science

We know what science is, right?  Science is all about cool experiments and learning more about this natural world that God put us in.  Scientists are trying to figure out our world!  They do this by studying what they see, guessing about what they don't, and then experimenting to see how close they can get their guesses (hypothesis) to match their observations (experiments). There are all kinds of different types of scientists, they study different things.

Engineering

If you know what building means, you almost know what engineering means.  Engineering is building but in a very well-defined and orderly way.  Let's say you decided to design and build a snack machine.  So you go to all the garage sales you can find and collect all the miscellaneous scraps of metal, hinges, and left legged wooden doll parts in the city.  Now you come home, dump it in your garage and build a snack machine.  Okay, so there you go, you're a builder.  

An engineer, on the other hand, would think first about the problem.  Hmm. . . what's our problem?

The famous scientist Albert Einstein (I know, I know, this is the engineering section but just let me talk!) said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. 

That is very much how an engineer thinks.

1. Define the problem.  
2. Design the solution.
3. Build the solution.

So you can guess how an engineer would go about creating our imaginary snack machine.  There are all kinds of different types of engineers, they design and build different things.

Technology is Applied Science and Engineering

Technology isn't just the latest calculator or a cool iPad.  Technology is a whole mess of things that come from work in the fields of science and technology.  But what does applied mean?  Applied means taking something out of a textbook or out of an experiment and making it useful in everyday life.  A cookbook is an example of culinary (food related) engineering.  A cookie recipe is a design for a food product.  Making the perfect cookie is applied engineering and eating it is, mm, well, yummy.

Finally!  Information Technology

Now we have some background and can finally ask what is Information Technology?

Wait!!  What is Information??

Ok, we almost jumped the gun there!  What is information?  That's pretty simple really, it's information. Ooops!  Can't do that.  Information is facts about something and when I say facts, I mean little pieces of . . . well, you know.  Those little pieces don't have to be true.  Just because someone says something doesn't make it true, does it?

In the old days. . . I mean realllllly old days. . .

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, before humans knew how to write things down, information was passed "by word of mouth".  This means that when the caveman Grog was telling Bobo about the saber toothed tiger, that information only lasted until either Bobo forgot it, he told someone, or was eaten by a saber toothed tiger (who were famously good information digesters).

Then came charcoal. . . 

At some point the cavemen started drawing pictures on the cave walls and now information could be passed on and read and used by many, many more people.  What a huge technological leap that was!  That means their technology (their techniques) had improved a lot.

Then came writing. . .

Eventually, our ancestors got tired of drawing big pictures to tell stories so the pictures got smaller and smaller.  In fact, it's kind of cool that many of the asian languages still look like little pictures.  This is the Chinese word for food, notice how it looks like food on a plate or in a bowl:

You can just imagine how over thousands of years, the drawing of that plate of egg noodles got simpler and simpler until it was just what you see there.  Here are some more interesting examples of that.  

So ok, you get the idea.  Humans eventually developed a written language and that allowed the amount of information we were able to store to grow.  Then we developed books and our information piles grew even more.  Then printing presses were invented so making books became easier and easier and what happened?  The information that mankind produced and wanted to save continued to grow and grow and grow.

Then computers came along and the whole game changed!  Information that used to take entire buildings to store could now be stored in very small places (we'll talk about this more later).  Information we already had was growing like Jack's beanstalk and when computers came into the picture, it became like billions of those growing beanstalks.

The charcoal used to write on the cave, the books, printing presses and finally the computers -- all of these are technologies that have been and continue to be used to manage information.

Finally Again!  Information Technology

Well, we aren't quite there yet but you're starting to get the picture.  Each one of these advancements in our (human) ability to produce information has increased by gobs and gobs the amount of information that we need to keep track of!    Information Technology is how we've always done that.  In the old, old, old days, we used charcoal on a cave wall because that was the best technology.  Recently we started using computers because that's the best technology.

It's not perfect but we'll start there, Information Technology is what helps mankind to manage all of our information.  Information continues to grow and grow and grow, just like it's always done. 

Hopefully you're starting to see why we thought this blog is so important!  Information is all around us and managing that information in a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand different ways is the job of people who work in Information Technology.

There are all kinds of Information Technologists, they help in different ways to keep track of all this information.

Next Time

Let's take a diversion from Information Technology as a broad topic and talk about one of its main gears: the computer.

Blog blog blog, what are you even saying??

BLOG or Blog or blog?

In other words, what is this thing?

Hello again!  Today I am going to give a brief outline of what these blog entries are and how you can use them.

In the old days. . .

We will visit the old days periodically.  Getting a really good understanding of  Information Technology often involves understanding how it changed over time.  For example, you get electronic mail and call it email.  But why is it called mail at all?  If you stop and think about it, your understanding of the word "email" is really built from your understanding of postal mail (also called snail mail).  How much sense would it make to get mail on your computer?

It's likely that when you grow up and have kids, they may never see a postal worker or see a mailbox on the street!  Snail mail is very slow and extremely expensive compared to email and it's often debated in congress about getting rid of it altogether.

So back to my story.  In the old days of the internet it was common for people to write daily "letters" or "posts" that everyone could read.  This was called web logging (since the internet even from the earliest days was nicknamed "the web").  You don't even have to say that fast three times to see that "web log" soon become "blog".  So that's what we have here - a daily web log!

What's in the blog?

Our itkid blogs will be short and sweet!  You don't have to read a blog every day, sometimes you don't have time.  When you do read it, our itkid blog will talk about one topic and sometimes give you more internet links to go out and research and do more reading.  It might give you an experiment to try or a video to watch.

Do these things!  The blog is short to just to make a point about some topic.  Sooooo much has already been written about IT that we won't rewrite the same things but just provide a pointer for you to go out and explore.

For example, if you're interested to read more about the history of blogging, check out the wikipedia entry on it.

Some links in the blog posts are only there if you're really interested in learning more about that topic.  Other links might be really important in order to understand the topic.  So we'll make it clear when a link is really important to read!

Read the blogs in order!  They will build on each other so even if you don't have time to read them sometimes, when you do have time read them in the order they are published.

Coming up!

So what is coming up?  Let's first take another crack at defining this thing we're trying to learn: IT.  Then maybe we'll layout out the next few episodes and try to mix it up a bit by sending you out to read other interesting IT tidbits out on the internet.

Keep in touch!

What is a blog? What is a kid? What is IT? Did I say what is IT??

What is this?

What the heck is this?  This is a blog for YOU kids to talk a little bit about IT!  Who is YOU?  Well, if you are reading this, YOU is you.
What is IT?  IT is an acronym for Information Technology.  We will talk about Information Technology here so the definition of that will grow over time.  We first need to define some of the words we want to use to define Information Technology.  It's crazy.  For now, let's just say it's all things geeky and computery and internety.

What are we doing here?

We are taking really small bites out of a big piece of pie.  The pie: what do I need to know about Information Technology in the year 2020?

What are small bites?  Well, there is a LOT to learn but don't panic!  You have a lot of time.  So we will look at this thing a little bit at a time.

Uhh, dude, why do I want to know that?

Because when it comes to technology there are increasingly four levels of technology knowledgey:

1. Those who think "technology" is what lets them change the TV channel without leaving the couch (did you realize that "in the old days", there were NO remote controls!?  It was so much work!)
2. Those who use technology.
3. Those who understand technology.
4. Those who make technology.

In the world of the future, you want to be at least level 3.  K-12 schools mostly teach to level 2!!

What's next?

• First, let's make sure you all can see this post.  Leave a comment if you see this!
• Second, next blog I will write about how the blogs will be written and how you can get the most out of them.
• Finally, we'll start learning some Information Technology!

See you next time!