Wednesday, September 02, 2009

The "Good Enough Revolution"

There was a very good article over at wired about the "Good Enough Revolution". The basic premise is eventually we hit a turning point where quality is sufficiently high people suddenly start opting for cheapness or volume.

In education this will be especially significant in terms of student access to computers. In Alberta, as in many other places, the ground work is being sown to prepare the teaching profession for increased student access and use of computers. In talking to some other colleagues about this issue, we wondered if the sequence many schools will face will be as follows:
  1. More access through specialized 1-1 (laptop) projects
  2. Increased use of student owned devices such as ipods, personal lap tops etc
  3. Enough student owned devices in a class that schools deal with the exceptions of have-nots rather than worrying about everyone
  4. Inability to buy "good" machines for everyone
  5. Move to cloud computing to step around having to buy everyone a "good" machine
  6. A limiting of powerful computers to specialized multi-media labs