I fell in love with computers in middle school and never looked back. By my senior year in college I was building computers, websites, and databases, and working as a technician in the campus computer lab. One afternoon a first-year student came in trying to insert a floppy disk backward. It settled something I was recognizing: technology was becoming the foundation of everything, and the people who most needed to understand it were the least likely to get help figuring it out.
Without an education credential, the public schools weren’t an option, so I started where I could, teaching kids in after-school recreation centers and providing informal help to the staff and adults around them. I moved into corporate training from there, working my way up to Director of Professional Development over twelve years. I founded Life’s Digital Bits during those years as a side project, a way to make sure that people who couldn’t afford or access traditional IT help had somewhere to turn. After twelve years in corporate, I left to go full-time with LDB. Circumstances brought me back into a classroom for six years as a computer science teacher at an all-girls high school, and that chapter clarified everything.
One conversation made it undeniable. An alumna, the CEO of a non-profit organization, mentioned in passing that she let someone else in her life handle the technology. Here was a capable, accomplished leader deferring on technology not because she lacked the ability, but because somewhere along the way she had absorbed the message that it wasn’t hers to understand. And if the people around her were watching that every day, then what I was doing in the classroom was working against something much older and much larger than a curriculum gap.
That’s the problem Life’s Digital Bits is built to address: building the kind of understanding and confidence that lasts, for the people the mainstream tech industry has never really designed its services for.
I’ve been doing this work in one form or another for over 25 years, and my doctoral research at Fordham keeps sharpening the question of who gets left out and why. I’m still as certain as I was in that computer lab that technology belongs to everyone, and that the right kind of support can change what someone believes is possible for them.
If that resonates, I’d like to hear from you.
