There is no “now” now.
Written by Skip on October 29th, 2009A few days ago I had a conversation with a colleague that went something like this:
C: I just want to do what I do now with technology. I don’t want to know about social networking. It’s too hard to keep track of everything.
Me: I…ummm…it’s…did you get the time for the next faculty meeting?
What I wanted to say, and what I’ve been thinking about for some time, is that there is no such thing as catching up. There’s no “now” with technology. If you’re not constantly moving forward, then by default you’re moving backward. Particularly with technology, moving backward is an express ticket to irrelevancy. I liken it to being the best typewriter repairperson in the world–you may be very good at your craft, but who cares?
Two years ago, we weren’t talking about Twitter, and not much about Facebook. In a bit less than four years, YouTube has gone from a cautious startup to serving over one billion videos a day. Fifteen years ago we were just starting to talk about the World Wide Web. The processing power used for the first moon landing is roughly equivalent to the processing power of a Furby, a toy that was interesting 5 or 6 years ago. As quickly as things seem to change, we’re probably still on the early curve of an exponential explosion of technologies that will vastly change the way we do just about everything.
But we seem to be stuck on viewing technology as an object and not as a process. Much of the daily work I used to have to perform on my laptop (which replaced my desktop when it became much more important to be able to carry my work with me) can now be performed on my iPhone. The vessel is irrelevant to me as long as I can do what I need to do. Technology isn’t my laptop, or my iPhone. It’s a process for communicating, collaborating, creating, producing, and (somewhat recursively) for keeping up with technology. For an educator, it’s simply a tool of the trade. If you don’t understand how to use it professionally and instructionally, you’ll soon be looking for an office next to the typewriter repair shop.
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Brilliant! Have you read Accelerando by Charles Stross… I believe we are in a state of exponential change in at least a half dozen technology horizons. Institutions, especially of the educational variety, continue to change linearly with a low slope. Visualize how silly policies prohibiting cell phone/mobile devices in schools will seem a few years from now.
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I haven’t read that, John, but I’ve just placed an order at Amazon on your recommendation.
Why do some institutions–notably education, particularly K12–actively resist getting on the curve? It’s got to be more than just money.
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That’s one of the few books by Stross I’ve read… it was a fun read. I also think we are experiencing exponential technological change (cf Ray Kurzweil) but I don’t think positive change in the realm of education is a given by any means… the principles that inform productive use of technology are ancient (which fits perfectly with the notion that it isn’t about the technology but the process and how tech provides affordances that can forward that process)– from Plato and Socrates forward– but there’s a loooong history of education not just being resistant, but ultimately succeeding in marginalizing and finally ignoring those changes.