By David Nagel, Campus Technology
Even as technology proliferates in education at unprecedented rates, new hurdles — including limitations of the human mind to keep up with technological advances — are throwing themselves in the way of effective implementation.Here’s a word you don’t hear much anymore: obsolescence. But it’s a word that’s making a comeback in 2017 in a new and distressing way. Popularly used in a business context (e.g. the planned obsolescence of consumer devices that are designed to fall apart in a few years, like cars and laptops), it’s now being used to describe the human mind. It’s no longer the technology that’s becoming obsolete too quickly; it’s the knowledge of technology that’s rapidly falling behind advances or changes in technologies. And that obsolescence, according to the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition, is just one of the six major challenges facing technology in higher ed in the coming years.
Share on Facebook