Saturday, April 10, 2010

Growing Older and Techier

Over breakfast, my mother asked me to create for her a Facebook account. Then, she suggested that I get my father on Twitter, to which he replied that he would much rather setup a blog.

I drank my fresh hazelnut-flavored coffee from Baguio and when the caffeein kicked in, I got to work on their requests. Although they are already senior citizens, my parents have been able to use AIM, Yahoo, Skype, Magic Jack, and Google gradually over the years, to keep in touch with my siblings who are scattered all over the globe. My mom can access her bank accounts online, Papa reads his newspapers from the computer, buying only the Sunday issues, and together they watch their grandchildren on YouTube .

Before we got to the new account creations however, they asked me to give them a more detailed tutorial on how to maximize their Presario. I taught them about browsers, URLs, search engines, and websites. They actually had a lot of questions and it was fun. I had more tech-savvy siblings but I was the one they lived with so they didn't know what they were missing.

I showed them, like I did my legal research students, how to use keywords for more accurate results. My father's name is unique so we found only one website on Yahoo that had his full name - and it led to the Acknowledgment page of my brother's dissertation from NCSU. My parents were so delighted.

We were in the middle of reading my LinkedIn profile, which was the first search result when we typed in my name, when said brother suddenly invited us to a Voice Call through Skype. The tutorial was put on hold. My parents said we'll continue next week.

They leave next month for an extended trip to Sydney, to take care of my niece once my sister goes back to work. They want to watch TFC online and get in touch with their classmates, relatives, and friends via email and Facebook. I know of parents teaching their kids how to use the Internet responsibly. I am happy and proud to be a daughter teaching her parents how to leave their comfort zone and befriend their new laptop.

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