DIT Bits

Dueling with inevitability is, well, inevitable when managing IT. There is a relentless logic to many technology developments, which I suppose is, well, inevitable when dealing with zeroes and ones. You can see the endgame coming, and you’re still amazed by the speed with which it arrives.

So there is a choice to make. Do you see inevitability as a problem or an opportunity?

Example: New operating systems make much loved older software obsolete. New operating systems are inevitable. So is obsolescence. Is there really a point to hanging your head and wishing the vendor had made a different choice? Or railing against the forces of entropy? Why not seize the opportunity to reexamine the goals you had for using the software you did, evaluating whether or not those goals were met, and coming up with new, more ambitious goals that reflect recent changes in the educational landscape, and then seeking out new means to achieve them?

Example: It’s inevitable that every student will eventually bring a computing device of his or her own to school every day (most do already, but we pretend it doesn’t really matter since the phones don’t quite look like a computer yet and they mostly keep them in their pockets because they get in trouble if they don’t). We can see this as a classroom management problem, or an opportunity to rethink what we do in classrooms while we still have a chance at grabbing some initiative (the clock is seriously ticking on this). Better yet, we can cut to the chase and make it possible to equip the students with a device that’s specifically built and configured to help us take advantage of a common tool kit, carefully selected as one set of means to achieve the renewed, shared goals we have.

There is an old Monty Python clip that shows a hitchhiker climbing into a car that stopped to pick him up. He sits down, closes the door, and looks over at the driver only to find it is a crash test dummy. The camera cuts to the look of terror on the hitchhiker’s face and then cuts to a long view as the car crashes into the inevitable wall.

It doesn’t have to be that way with technology. Even in the face of inevitability, there is always a choice to be made about how we respond.

Posted on February 15th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized