IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

The most interesting phase of a project is setting it up, designing it, scanning
the domain, framing the issues, specifying an action, seeking information
and advice, planning the work, putting together the team. All these
are design tasks, and they are best learned by experience. Designing and
setting up a project can be messy, time-consuming, hard to manage—and
won’t go according to plan. Just like the real world.
Design Principle 4: Technology and Networks
Learning 149
When wiring up schools to the Internet fails to deliver instant, dramatic
results—which is nearly always—politicians often blame teachers, whom
they have long tended to regard as an impediment to technological modernization.
The real culprits are policymakers who think of technology as a
cost-saving cure-all. Serious budgets are persistently voted for the hardware
of connectivity (computers, modems, and so on), but grossly inadequate
resources tend to be allocated to content and process development—the
what and how of learning in new ways. Education planners have persistently
ignored the advice of their own software suppliers that 30–40
percent of any technology budget should be devoted to staff training and
organizational development.
Outside education, larger companies reckon that their true ICT costs—
when equipment, training, technical support, connectivity and hosting,
software licenses, and so on are taken into account—are about ten thousand
dollars a year per person. No government in the world invests that
amount to support technology in schools. In the United States and Europe,
head teachers and principals would count themselves lucky to have a technology
budget of ten thousand dollars per school. 41 International Data
Corporation has calculated that the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a
school with seventy-five computers is $2,251 per year per computer,
whereas for a comparably sized small business its TCO is $4,517 per computer,
or more than twice that amount. 42 Tom Stewart, author of Intellectual
Capital, puts the figure for business computing much higher: He states
that the five-year costs of supporting a client-server computing network is
$48,000 per person. 43
The total amount spent on technology is not the most important point.
I argued earlier that the main promise of technology does not lie in putting
course notes and lecture transcripts online. That’s the start, not the end,