Just how pervasive is tech?

As I sit down and think of the number of hours in the past few weeks I’ve spent at work outside of the normal work day, one thing becomes apparent to me.  EVERYONE is using technology in our school district a lot more than before.  When I ask a teacher about how they see technology being used, their responses are, for the most part, focused in their domain.  Some will know from cross-departmental meetings how other teachers are using technology, but that is going to be limited to maybe 40% of the total teaching staff; there is an entire realm any one teacher just won’t know.  (I for one don’t really know how math uses technology, other than interactive whiteboards)

Now, for a second, think of all the teachers in a building and expand that to all the teachers and employees in a district.  Suddenly, it becomes hard to name the specific usages, but it is apparent there is a lot of tech usage.  E-Mail, Web, Databases, local resources, streaming media, wireless, printing, etc, etc.  So, where is all this going?

With technology systems becoming more stable, this stability and availability becomes a norm, and anything outside of this norm is viewed as “a problem”.  I think back to the first three months at my current employer.  Letting people know they couldn’t access a file for a day while data is migrated was acceptable.  Contrast this to today.  A day is unacceptable.  Even two hours is a big deal.  I’ve even seen working on a service for 15 minutes 11:15pm on a weeknight to result in emails.

The amazing part behind this is it no longer is only one service, one server, one application.  With pretty high certainty, if I unplug a cable or turn a random machine off, within an hour someone would let me know there was a problem.  Technology was at one time, an isolated beast.  Today we are tending to see the technology split into two camps.  The traditional curricular aspect dealing with ways tools can be used in the classroom is one direction, and the aspects pertaining to hardware running a bit more in a corporate / enterprise approach.  For this model to work well, it takes the right (or left) minded individuals working in concert both focused on a delivering a product.

I turn to the post thumbnail.  Each individual piece of rock representing a system, service, etc, works to deliver a foundation.  That foundation needs a vision and direction.  We can take what is behind us to learn and focus on the now; projecting ahead, there is no certain direction or destination.  Without a good foundation, the application is useless.  This is how the hardware side of tech works; delivering a specific product not always knowing the application.