It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.

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There is a 40 episode show from AMC called Halt and Catch Fire. It’s a fictionalized few of the early computer revolution in the 80s up to the search engine wars and the start of Web 2.0 in the late 90s early 00s. The technology of the show is very fictionalized, but that’s not the core of the show. This is shown in the first episode when one of the characters sums up what the computer revolution will be. “It’s not the thing. It’s the thing that gets you to the thing”. That pretty much sums up how I feel about education and technology.

We don’t new technology just for the sake of doing technology, we do technology to get us to where we want to be. To allow us to experience things that we couldn’t do otherwise. To create things that we wouldn’t be able to do. Every student now has access to equipment that only a few people with millions of dollars would have been able to use as recently as 10-15 years ago.

I get frustrated when I see people mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. Not because of some burning hatred of social media, but because of the missed opportunity. Tik Tok does get people creating, maybe there is hope yet?