Revolting Tech
It has been a typical couple of days with tech.
I spent a bunch of time on the phone with various offices of a major telecommunications company (rhymes with “Shmerizon”) in an effort to upgrade our wireless plan, but this, it turns out, requires an actual phone call which in turn involves being passed around to various departments, each one of which requires a new explanation of what you’re trying to do and why. This is all because we were using a Shmerizon feature that allowed us get just one bill for all of our services, but because our wireless is sharing a bill with “another company”, there were extra steps. So apparently this large corporation is really several corporations, or one corporation whose internal communication is so bad that it might as well be several separate companies.
Which seems not uncommon, as meanwhile I am trying to settle issues with my tablet from Shmicroshmoft which has strange glitches that keep it from working well with other Shmicroshmoft products, for some reason that nobody knows. This particular issue I solve on my own, pretty much by randomly switching some settings and stumbling across something that neither the message boards.
Both of these take a while because on my home computer, I must deal with a browser that balloons up to huge KB use until it has to be restarted, which is also slow because the Shmerizon DSL into my home is a terribly noisy line that repeated attempts by the company to fix have, in five years, been unsuccessful. It is especially bad when it rains, to the point that you can’t have a conversation on the land line. There are no other reliable internet providers locally,
That’s actually why we need the improved wireless plan– for when we anchor our household wi-fi on the phones. This trick does not work at school, where signal is bad that the phone is basically unusable (and has to be either plugged in or turned off to avoid draining all power). I can take care of some prep work at school, provided I have what I need unblocked. And because our school has gone Google, the sites and services that are Google uncompatable are a no-go at school, too.
Many of these issues are exacerbated by the age of my equipment, but I can’t afford to upgrade every six months to keep everything high grade and current. My home desktop is practically a dinosaur at five years old, which may be one more reason I need to reboot the modem almost daily to keep the connection working.
And I am not a Luddite or a digital dope. But this kind of constant maintenance and nursing and workarounds is part of my daily tech routine.
So tell me again how ed tech is going to revolutionize schools.
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Peter, your comment about upgrading every six months resonated with me. The fact that this stuff is changing so quickly is one of the arguments I use when people insist that young children need to become familiar with technology as early in their lives as possible. What’s the point in trying to get little, five-year-old fingers adept at keyboarding before they’re ready, when soon everything will be voice-activated? What’s the point in teaching them to use software that will be obsolete before they have any real need for it, when they could be doing what children should be doing in childhood: being a child!
It creates a real problem for public schools. Many schools jumped on the bandwagon for doing away with textbooks and replacing them with computers, not realizing that to stay current, the computers need to be replaced more often than the textbooks did– and at greater expense.