HW#3.1 - Friday's encounters with Technology

This course (Technology and Education) is making me more worried than ever that everyone is getting completely carried away with the notion that an entire country is going to sustain its current economic advantage by creating 'content'.

Sure, we need to train the coming generations for a future we can hardly envisage. And, sure, that future is going to demand creativity and adaptability on a scale we will gasp at. But, as I said yesterday, it is not about how the Web (2.0 or greater) is going to change education, but rather how we, as educators, use what we know (and are learning) about the nittty-gritty of education to harness the power of new technologies. To me it is important where the cart and the horse are in relation to each other.

So the dominant thoughts running through my head all day were about how much of the technology we use throughout the day is real, hard, material stuff. And how few people it really takes to produce of the creative stuff we consume (free, or paid for)

Take, for example, a software application called Fathom that we used yesterday for the first time. Here you had a bunch of jaded adults squealing with delight, as if they were still teenagers waiting for their music idols to come on stage. KCP Technologies makes both Fathom and Geometer's Sketchpad. As best as I can tell, the entire team, is 9 people. That's it - 9 people.

Last I recall, Twitter employs less than 60 people, and has an estimated 'worth' of $1B, with no profit. That is like each employee getting $16M if they went public today.

Microsoft in its best year must have generated $60B in revenue, with a current market cap of about $200B. Assuming about 90,000 people in its global workforce, that's about $700,000 in revenue per employee. (Note that only about 35,000 employees are in actual Product R&D, or 'content')

Google is likely to be even more profitable/efficient. Not to even mention what used to go on on Wall Street.

Compare these numbers with the United States, which has a population of 300M, a GDP of $14Trillion, and a per capita GDP of $47,000. It takes only 250 Microsoft's match the entire United States in GDP. Where are the other $175 million people going to work?

You can't have half a country uploading and downloading content to YouTube or building community on Second Life.


Here's the 'content' my family consumed today:
[Note that I did not directly pay for the last two, and everyone know how much money the news media is making these days.]

• News: Daily, weekly, & radio.
• Board game (Rummikub, Table Football - from instructions in a book)
• Children's animated movie
• Google/Bing search on the purpose of education.
• Public website hosting John Dewey's My Pedagogic Creed.

Here's the hard stuff that I noticed made my life pleasant today:
[The last four, although they are not hard, and although I did not pay for them, are as good as inventions. The point is that they are not content. The rest I paid for.]

• Phone
• Microwave*
• Alarm clock
• Central Heating
• Weighing scale
• Outdoor thermometer
• Body thermometer
• Kettle
• Pocket radio & headphones
• Sewing machine
• The swimming pool
• Soccer league
• Instant Messaging
• E-mail
• Twitter
• PDF

[*Just tonight my wife exclaimed that Percy Spencer who invented the microwave oven should have gotten a Nobel prize. I think the comparision to a certain someone else was unspoken.]