It just keeps coming,,,

Mark Crotty has a blog named "To Keep Things Whole" and he recently wrote a great post titled "Questions for Tech Leaders". Read it when you have the time. In the post, Mark talks about technology in education, the nature of change and poses questions to technology leaders about the nature of what they do. It got me thinking about how much and how fast everything has and is changing, in everyday life, in education and in our professional lives because of these technological changes.

Technology isn’t like carpentry or plumbing. In those fields, practitioners build their skills over time. But, one can argue that the tools have remained somewhat fixed for some time. With technology you make a bet that whatever area, tool, or software program you choose to focus on will be around in five years. There is so much road kill littering the Information Super Highway that it isn’t hard to begin to list the names of once high flying, promising tech apps, philosophies, businesses, and technologies that didn't pan out and are now gone.

A while ago the World Wide Web had its 20th birthday. Twenty years ago the first web sites were done completely in applications like Notepad. There were no editors at the time and I think Photoshop was in version 2. People were using the Magellan Browser and Netscape was brand new. Looking back, it was really quite primitive. Since then there has been LINUX, Windows, Mac, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, Cold Fusion, Perl, PHP, CSS, XHTML, XML, Flash and a long list of computer protocols. We’ve seen the rise and fall of Napster, AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Pets.com, WebVan.com, theGlobe.com, and Yahoo; as well as a completely new world in which Bookstores, Magazines, Newspapers, the Music business, the Movie business, Network TV, Cable TV, Radio exist (or cease to exist).

Every once in a while I’ll talk to someone about technology. They will say something like, “Man, I really missed the boat on that (fill in the blank). I wish I got into it a long time ago.”

To which I reply…What did you choose to invest in today?.