bureaucracy

Growing up, like some of my generation and generations before, there was a culture of staying with a company throughout a lifetime. This culture was changed sometime in the 1980s, when companies started aggregating and sacrificing 'human resources' to the 'bottom line'.

Over the last 10 years, there has been something bothering me that I couldn't quite put a finger on. It was ethereal and numbing, something that defied description- yet aspects were apparent in so many different things. While people were busy trying to outblog each other in some insane competition for popularity and implicit revenue, I kept reading the same hype on different topics that simply didn't seem... warranted. Things were going to transform our lives.

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.

The Alert Retrieval Cache concept constantly reminds me that technology is almost never the problem.

People are.

I've written today that emergency SMS is required beforehand, but I've written that before. And the idea has yet to take off - which at first frustrated me but now only puzzles me.

Today, I had an eureka moment while changing the oil in the pickup.