Peering Over the Leading Edge... into a pile of digital debris

[Ric Wiltse]

Note to MACUL Space members: The following article is by Jason Ohler from the University of Alaska. Jason is our 2009 MACUL conference opening keynote speaker on Friday, March 20. Educators may reprint Jason's columns online and in print publications free of charge.

Peering over the Leading Edge ... into a pile of digital debris

By Jason Ohler | TechWit
Our throw-away culture is unrelenting in its desire to make room for the new at the expense of the previous. Faster, lighter, cheaper ... always with a shorter half-life.

I got to see this first hand recently when I volunteered to head up Operation Seek and Discard. Our mission was to search every nook and cranny in my University of Alaska office building for defunct technology that was resting in some out-of-sight-out-of-mind place.
For one week, myself and a brave cadre of colleagues spelunked under desks, in closets, in filing cabinets long ago locked, and managed to scare up enough obsolete tech to sink a mainframe. It turns out that a lot of the defunct gear was hiding in plain sight on people's shelves and desks. We had just learned to ignore it, the way we had learned to ignore the water cooler that hadn't been filled in years.

At the end of the week, the dispossessed pieces of tech were gathered in a pile in the center of a large room, forming a collage of hulking desktop computers, low resolution cameras, VHS players and a mishmash of cords and cables that held it all together the way spaghetti holds together a great Italian meal. People would come by and stare before shaking their heads and saying, "Remember when we would sell our own kids for one of those things," pointing to a color printer the size of a small refrigerator. "Now we can't give them away." Alas, we can't give our kids away either.

As I stared at all the obsolete tech silently huddled together doing the dance of the digitally dead I felt a mixture of guilt, sadness and denial. After all, I helped convince the forces of the industrial age to walk out on to the leading edge, only to watch the edge sprint away from us at gigaspeeds.
It is amazing how the concept of obsolescence in the digital age has morphed into something we would not have recognized even 20 years ago. A car with a seized engine and a rusted out frame is still good for parts. But that isn't how the digital age works. Most of the stuff we had to get rid of worked just fine.

The only problem with it is that it was... sloooowwww. And because it was slow, it had become incompatible with the faster technology everyone else was using. So, it was time to give the slow the heave ho, and it's off to state surplus we go.

The good news is that our institution does a good job of wringing every last drop out of technology that the public will allow. After all, the public will be the first to criticize an educational institution running last year's gear.
But the bad news is also the good news. Despite anyone's best efforts, the digital age seems destined to generate landfill by the truckload. This could change. If the public demanded laptops made out of spare parts and recycled cardboard I am sure the engineering community could rise to the challenge. But I don't see that happening soon. And it's not just institutions that make a mess - we do it too. We wouldn't dream of making our kids use slow computers running yesterday's operating system. It's the digital age equivalent of not feeding our children.

At the end of the Operation Seek and Discard, I had created two piles. The first was stuff that we would either melt down for scrap, donate to the local gun club for target practice or ship off to state surplus. That is, anything that was more than three years old.

The second much smaller pile consisted of stuff we might actually use. While much of pile two was on the cusp of obsolescence, there was one piece of technology that had been around for 30 years and still had another 30 years left in it: the upright Royal vacuum cleaner. The custodian claimed that.

• Jason Ohler is professor of educational technology at the University of Alaska Southeast and can be reached at [e-mail].

[Pamela]

I recently brought my computer to the tech department for a hopeful repair session. (My niece sat on the screen portion of my ibook that was sitting open on the ottoman in my living room). The hurtful news was that it could not be saved. Technology does not just hide in the corners of our institutions; it is also in the corners of our basements, closets, and attics. It is so hard to part with technology that we pay for longer that it actual usefulness. In desperation to answer my email, I pulled put my old blue toilet-seat Mac laptop hiding at the bottom of my bookshelf. Even though it turned on, it was too outdated to be upgraded for use on today's Internet. It remains too old to use, and yet, too "good" to just toss away…

[Ben Rimes]

Nice little article. I featured it on the top of the BLogs page.