I really didn't have to ask my mom what the most important information technology she uses at work is. I have plenty of evidence of it already: She brings one home every night, she has had one at her desk at every office of hers I've visited, and as far as I know, it's pretty much all she looks at all day at work. I'm talking, of course, about a personal computer. My mom is an architect, which is a profession that is pretty much always tied to computer use at this point. Once heavily based on drafting and sketching, architecture is now almost all done on the computer. For this reason, my mom is actually not technically challenged at all when it comes to PCs, because she's almost always used them, be it at work or at home.
My mom actually went through all of architecture school not using a computer, as architecture software hadn't become so ubiquitous at that point that it was being taught in schools. She was aware of how to use a keyboard, since she had used one in helping with her school newspaper in high school, but other than that her computer experience had been limited to those that used punch cards rather than PCs as we think of them today. Her first real experience with the computers she'd go on to use for her entire career happened at the beginning of said career, when she worked in New York. She did not find it extremely hard to use, though, and it wasn't a change for her at all since she had never actually worked in architecture when it was all done by hand. She was taught to use it by her coworkers and by lessons given to her entire office. It wasn't hard to use, she says, but it was strange given she had spent her entire college career how to do these tasks by hand.
My mom feels that architecture done using the computer is far more quick and productive, but there are still some architects out there who prefer not to use it. My mom's boss at her previous job had no idea how to use the computer for architecture, or really for anything at all, and did all his drawings by hand still. I wouldn't say that there are factions in architecture because of this, per se, since very few people don't use the computer today, but there is still some debate over which method works better. My mom likes to draw, and didn't have an issue with it in college, but today says she probably wouldn't be able to do her work without her computer.
In respect to this course and my own experiences, it seems that architecture has been one of the professions that has most embraced technology. While computers are helpful, architecture requires a human being to actually construct designs, so there was never any threat of computers replacing workers, much as there was in other workspaces such as factories or libraries. For this reason, no level of worker in architecture really had to fear the addition of technology to the workspace, so perhaps this is why technology has been embraced by architects. I think that my mom's experiences with drawing in school and using computers as soon as she got out is pretty common for an entire generation of architects, but I know that computer programs are taught and utilized in colleges today, so today's students come right out of college with the skills to work. My mom still has to learn (she's currently taking a class on the program Revit for work), but I think she's actually more technologically savvy than many people her age because of her job.
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