The March of Progress

I remember sitting at my friend's computer in 1988, discussing with him the future of computing technology. He had just installed a memory upgrade, and his computer was the fastest machine we had ever seen. We waxed prophetic for a moment, and theorized that should a computer ever reach 1 gigabyte of memory, it would suffer almost insurmountable overheating problems... and should it ever reach 1 terabyte (heavens!), the power requirements of maintaining the drive would cause local brownouts as the power grid was overwhelmed.

Oops. Good thing we didn't put any money on that one.

So why bring this up on an education-themed blog? Because the future of education and the future of technological progress go hand in hand. With an increasing focus on integrating technology in the classroom, teachers must keep on top of what innovations come down the pipe, and must keep their minds open to the possibilities of what technology may or may not become available.

Good thing I've read William Gibson.