Money can't buy me love, but it can buy me nice gadgets!

I've been catching up on my reading of the discussion postings and adding a few of my own today. 21 unread posts for module 2 alone! Have done about half the required reading so feel able to add a few points. Ironically, what I end up posting just comes from my own experience and I didn't reference any of the reading I spent hours doing (other than a quick reference to Moore's Law.) I feel like I want to prove that I have done the reading, but at the same time I don't want to twist what I'm saying just to squeeze in a quotation from so-and-so. I suppose, when it comes to writing up final reports, I'll be more able to show evidence that I have done some research.
Another thing that struck me today is that my financial situation does actually affect my participation in this course. With reference to the fusion devices, I was reading postings from a few people talking about their latest gadgets. My mobile phone is 5 years old, and has no extras! And it's likely to be a lot older before I get a new one. I'm so unfamiliar with these new devices and their capabilities. I'm a real learn-by-doing person, and unless I've actually used one and become savvy with it, I'm not comfortable talking about it. I don't think I'll ever be an early adopter - I'll always be a laggard. Admittedly, it's not just financial - I'm not a risk-taker either.
All this talk of gadgets has made me realise how little I know about the technologies out there. There's a cluster of course members proudly listing all the things their PDAs can do, and it's all way over my head. I think that maybe I thought I would gain a knowledge of these things in the course, that maybe we would have some kind of directed discussion on particular technologies. But it's really a lot more general than that. There's very much a feeling of everyone doing their own thing and talking about there own thing, and I'm quite out of the loop. I realise that the nature of this course is that I should use this as a stimulus to go and do some research, but I can't really find the motivation. If I actually owned the technology and had to use it, that would be different. The only other motivation I think I would have was if research and discussion on actual devices was required by the course. I don't think that this would be too difficult to build into the structure of the course, but I suspect it's against the ethos of what Peter's trying to do.