WHAT do YOU THINK?
“It takes 20 years for a new idea to become an overnight success.” This quote, which I heard years ago from Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future, is still one of my favorites.
For early adopters and industry watchers alike, the steps towards adoption of a new technology or approach often seem painfully slow. The journey from the first 300-baud dial-up modems to today’s high-bandwith connections, from monochromatic text-only screens to media-rich digital environments took approximately 20 years – years during which skeptics challenged both the feasibility and the wisdom of putting such “extravagant” and “unnecessary” tools into the hands of young people.
Of course, now that Internet browsers, search engines, MP3 players and a variety of other handheld devices, wiki encyclopedias, streaming video, blogging, and social networking are a widespread reality, it’s becoming hard to remember a time when they were not a part of our lives. That’s because, as Malcolm Gladwell puts in his book by the same name, we’ve passed “the tipping point” – the "moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point … at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.”
Are we nearing that tipping point for one-to-one technology? Colleges and universities have certainly reached – and passed – that point by now; students are expected to have daily access to computers and the Internet in order to register for classes, pick up and turn in assignments, conduct research, communicate with professors and classmates, and much more. And many educators feel that K-12 schools are not far behind.
Do you agree? That’s the question we are asking in this month’s Quick Poll. And it’s one of the many questions that we address as we talk to districts across the country and look at data from sources such as America’s Digital Schools 2008.
As Tom Greaves, co-author of the ADS report, will explain in our November 18th webinar, “1:1 implementations are now relatively widespread. With 27.1% of districts reporting their involvement in 1:1 computing [and 13.2% more planning to implement 1:1 in the next two years] this trend has moved into the mainstream, especially since the ADS definition of 1:1 is fairly strict—at least a full grade and no mobile carts." How new is this phenomenon? Well, according to Greaves and ADS co-author, Jeanne Hayes, although they started very gradually, "1:1 implementations have been around for at least 20 years." Hmm. Interesting number.
-- Judy Salpeter, Editor
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