I've been quiet for a while because I've been considering some complicated things while juggling fragments of reality. This particular entry was brought on by advocates of a certain technology in education being unable to prove that technology in education has had a positive impact on educational results.

In one line, this could all be read as educational institutions wondering who moved their cheese. I'm just showing my working.

The societal definition of success arguably changes from one generation to the next. If we ignored the previous generations definitions of success, we could say that the definition of success is democratic. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily so since bureaucracy in institutions has a tendency to mitigate change, and the processes of bureaucracy are built upon societal definitions of success - sometimes surviving many generations.

Historically, this is where revolutions take place - not necessarily the violent revolutions but the successful revolutions. The Industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution. And, if we look at the course of the last century, we might find ourselves living at the tail end of a Democratic revolution.

But when is the last time there was an Educational revolution? A true change in the definition of what academic success is?

While at first I thought that technology improving education was putting the cart before the horse these days, I did not acknowledge that technology may be useful in evolving our definition of success in education.

I've been building my own computers since the late 1980s – the advent of the IBM PC architectures and the ability for 3rd parties to use the architectures made it everything fairly straightforward. As the years blew by, things became more complicated – but it was all manageable. Simple. Straightforward.

The Decades of Change

The floppy drive – the original 5 1/4” of the PCs (but not the original floppy by any stretch) died. It gave birth to the not-so-floppy plastic encased 'floppy'. And all was pretty much the same. Hard drive sizes went from 10 megabyte to 10 gigabyte in fairly short order. The fact that the ASUS eeePC on which I'm writing this is probably more powerful and more physically diminutive than any system during my first 20 years of computing is not lost on me.

The fact that I'm using it now is because the desktop's Gigabyte motherboard has, after 2 years, died. I was actually quite close to simply throwing the system out the second floor window, since I've been keeping it alive with hard drive changes, RAM upgrades and so forth. All of that stuff used to be fun, but now I want to focus on using the computer – not fixing it. I don't even fix computers for money anymore; it's simply not worth it to me. It's... boring. Repetitive. Annoying.