Mary+O.

A belated hello to the more literate Wiki users! My name is Mary Ocampo and while I've long been an over-user of the internet, I'm rather nervous about embarking on an online class, as such a task seems to render useless all of my strengths while highlighting my weaknesses as a student (self-regulating time management). I was born and raised in Manhattan, NY, and I attended two different universities for undergrad. First, I went to Brown University in Rhode Island, and then I transferred back to Manhattan for personal reasons to attend Columbia University, which I vastly preferred. At both schools I studied English Literature. I currently live in on the Upper East Side and work in the South Bronx.

Right now, I teach 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts. It is my first year teaching, and my school has been undergoing the process of possibly closing, so I have to say that I honestly have not found it the most supportive first year teaching environment imaginable, which accounts for the lateness of this post.

I constantly complain about being a middle school English teacher and tell everyone I encounter that I absolutely loathe it. The only person who doesn't believe me is my sister, who has been telling me since September that I wouldn't talk about my kids all the time if I actually hated my job. My sister, of course, has proven that she knows me better than I do for the last fifteen years at least. So I guess she's right -- I'm frequently overworked and miserable, but it's getting better, and there's really nothing I'd rather be doing.

__ **My Life as a Technology User** __

My life as a technology user, I think, has been vastly different than the average person of my age and education. I started quite early, and was unusually discerning about the ways in which I was comfortable sharing my life online -- I think I made some unusual choices on that matter in particular.

My family did not get (limited and painfully slow) access to the internet until I was 11 years old and halfway through the fourth grade. By this point, I had firmly established bookworm habits (I pretty much read under the table in class and ignored my teachers until I hit high school), so I basically treated the internet as an extension of my defining interests. The only thing I was interested in searching online was Harry Potter fanfiction.

Of course, Harry Potter fanfiction, over the years, led to fanfiction to dozens of other "fandoms," and to blogs and close-knit social communities. But I have to say that participating in that kind of online reading and writing community taught me very quickly how to be discerning in my reading and deliberate in my writing -- with no official filter for reading content to be funneled through (like a publisher), self-regulation becomes paramount. I honestly think my online reading habits did nothing but benefit my offline reading and writing habits when I was growing up.

I always, however, avoided the online networking sites that my peers gravitated to. I tried facebook for about a month my senior of high school, but found it creepy and time-consuming and deactivated my account. I find Twitter irritating -- who really cares that much what any given person is doing at a moment during the day? And I check my email, at best, once every three days. The internet gives us the illusion that we're more connected, but the plain truth is that people who don't enjoy being social won't use it to "be connected." I might use it to read thousands of words a day -- (cheaper) online NY Times newspaper subscriptions, blogs, recipes, websites of curiosities I want to look up, and a few hundred words of comfort-food fanfiction or original fiction by authors I know, but I genuinely despise my email inbox.

I wish I lived before the advent of internet and the email; my avoidance would be more socially acceptable. The modern notion of people being available at any hour of any day of any week is actually sort of absurd, and I wish the rest of the world would catch on to that.

__**Personal Use Project**__

I am using [|a Wordpress blog] to chronicle my struggles with Flickr for my personal use project.