Let me start with stating my background and experience with technology to better approach my thoughts about the 2 readings.
Through my career in the health industry, technology has exploded. I am a radiologic technologist of 29 years, just recently transitioning into education. I have been instructing at a local community college for 3 years. One of the positions that I held at a local hospital for 10 years was PACS administrator. That stands for “Picture Archive Communication System”. So I maintained the entire digital system for all the imaging departments. That included educating/training the end users of the given product.
Where I am going with this point is in the article “Beyond Technology Integration: The Case for Technology Transformation”, it defines markers that distinguish between the “old and the new”. The end user, customer, was a huge focus with the new technology according to the vendors. What we found, though, is that the engineers of the products designed them to what they felt was important and not necessarily to what was need. So there can be quite a disconnect there.
Secondly being “forced” to use the new technology, ie no more x-ray film, now you need to have a computer to access the imaging met with extreme resistance in most cases.
So the older, non-traditional student may struggle with the technology not being raised on it like what may be more common with the younger generation.
In conclusion, I think technology can have value if approached in a user friendly way.
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