It’s More About the User Than the Technology
With change comes fear. So with all the constant and massive changes in technology, so too come worries about how this will impact the status quo.
After several evenings of binge re-watching Mad Men with my wife, I came across this nugget of wisdom from Lloyd Hawley, the IT Guy cameo played by Robert Baker. It’s likely because I am also reading “Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job” by Zhao, Zhang, Lei, and Qiu (2016) and “Failure to Disrupt” by Reich (2020) that I made this connection in my head.
When we reflect on the exponential growth of computing capability and ubiquity (at least on one side of the Digital Divide), It is quite staggering how little change was present in the education system prior to Covid-19.
Supported by Moore’s Law, the article “Martec’s Law: Technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically” (Brinker, 2013) highlights the patterns behind this trend. In this middle ground is where we find ourselves today. It is where fear and innovation come to fight for dominance. This area considers the “sum of employee individual attitudes towards change / # individuals * organizational adaptivity constant = organizations ability to harness change” (Redford, 2013). This is about the culture of change in your organization. All this is to say that if you follow those two curves out beyond the confines of the graph, you will see a chasm growing to the point where organizations can not recover, become irrelevant, and are replaced. “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” (HG Wells, 1945).
“the iPhone 6’s clock is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster. You wouldn’t be wrong in saying an iPhone could be used to guide 120,000,000 Apollo era spacecraft to the moon, all at the same time.”
by Tibi Puiu February 11, 2020 in News, Technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
I will let out a bit of a secret.
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) May 6, 2020
I have been running a full IBM System/370 Mainframe on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero for ~5 years.
About 7 times faster System/370.
Millions of lines of COBOL JCLs running flawless on a battery.
Tested an entire bank’s mainframe COBOL on it. pic.twitter.com/xFArHx31VF
The goal isn’t just moving the same lesson from the blackboard, to the white board, to the SmartBoard – SAMR Model (Puentedura, 2010). The goal is to empower student-led learning and project-based learning which can and has been happening for a long time without computers, but could never before scale to the efficiency needed to maintain critical mass in organized education. The default style hasn’t prevailed because it is better, it has prevailed because it achieves minimum viable product with the minimum resources available. It is only to the credit of and off the backs of the teachers that success of any kind is achieved.
Fear of change is natural. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”― Franklin D. Roosevelt. What is needed in the face of change is collective courage and transformational leadership at all levels. Don’t unleash the power of computers, that will happen on its own. What is really needed is to unleash the power of educators, by empowering the learners through technology.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt