The Good Enough Revolution
This month’s Wired Magazine features Robert Capps’ article, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine. Capps’ piece, citing luminaries such as Flip Video inventors Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein, and New York University new-media studies professor Clay Shirky, illustrates how low-end, “good enough” technologies such as mp3 encoding, Kindle books, Skype phone calls, and Hulu television have become not only mainstream but the “perfect fit” for today’s world. As Capps notes:
Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”
To some, it looks like the crapification of everything. But it’s really an improvement. And businesses need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun.
The crapification of everything IS an improvement, and education needs to get used to it too. When used purposefully, cheap, fast, and simple tools can facilitate nothing short of a learning revolution.
This idea, of course, is nothing new; the OLPC Project traces it origins back more than 40 years to Seymour Papert and the LOGO programming language. Apple Computer introduced what is widely regarded as the first consumer-level digital camera in 1994. A few years later, VoIP, which is now available even in gaming systems, arrived in the form of the Vocaltec’s Internet Phone. So why haven’t more of these tools appeared in schools and/or made a greater impact on education? The short answer is that many teachers are not aware of the teaching-learning potential.
There are far more tools, tips, and techniques available to share than could fit in this space, but if you haven’t yet joined the revolution, I would encourage you to explore a few simple resources that can get you started:
- VoIP allows for free audio and video calls over the Internet. Of the many VoIP options available, Skype is perhaps the best known. The Skype in Schools resource page is filled with ideas for making learning come alive for students.
- Netbooks are small, inexpensive (most cost less than $400) mobile computers that account for nearly 20% of the overall PC notebook market. Although they are not suited for running high-powered applications, their price point can’t be beat. The Netbook Buyers Guide can help you find the netbook best suited for your organization.
- Digital Media tools are now pocket sized and nearly ubiquitous. The Handbook on Digital Video and Audio in Education is a very thorough resource for understanding how to effectively incorporate digital media into the curriculum.
The real power of simplified technology is that it can be mastered and manipulated with relative ease; students can literally bend it to their will (and your learning objectives). When given the power to connect, create, and share, “good enough” becomes truly great; not bad for crappy technology.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
[...] Original post: The Good Enough Revolution [...]
August 27th, 2009 at 8:03 am
I wonder if this improvement by “good enough” extends down to the hardware platform. I posted some thoughts on trading the tablet platform for netbooks at my blog.
Also, I think you use DyKnow and OneNote at MICDS. If I’m correct on that, do you think DyKnow using both ink and being somewhat collaborative has allowed tablets and ink to have more of an impact when being used by students (as opposed to teachers) than if you just had OneNote?
We do not have DyKnow at D-E. We looked into it, but the gain wasn’t clear given its high cost. Teachers explicitly use OneNote in various courses and students can use it as they wish in any course but as I start to look more at the power of collaboration though free/cheap “good enough” tools we give up ink as I’ve yet to experience any where ink works well or at all.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:51 am
[...] link is being shared on Twitter right now. @pcwoessner, an influential author, said New Post: The Good [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Bill-
Thanks for the thoughtful response; you raise some excellent questions. I think there is a cutoff line for “good enough” and often hardware doesn’t make the grade. I’m currently in the process of getting some Lenovo S12 netbooks to test in 5th/6th grade because I want to know how the $ to ink tradeoff might work with younger students (I have a hard time justifying a $2200 computer in 5th grade). The kicker is that to use popular programs like Scratch and Google Earth I can’t get a cheap netbook because the screen resolution is too low–so we’re up to a $500 “bargain” computer/netbook…go figure…
We do use DyKnow and OneNote with our Tablets, and while it isn’t cheap, DyKnow has become a key app in grades 7-12 because it’s changed how our teachers deliver content (yes–we still have lectures here
and it helps with class management (yes–sometimes our kids can get off task 
We feel those benefits, plus the collaborative and formative assessment features, make it well worth the cost and actually can’t imagine our program without it.
Hopefully Moore’s Law can extend into the ed tech world a bit more than it has and help make “good enough” great all the way around.
Cheers!
pat