I’ve fought tirelessly in campaigning for a paperless school, teaching several classes without requiring one sheet of printed paper. I was assigned a user name on the 8th day, of the cult of Mac, of the tribe of Apple, a technophile of technophiles; in regard to HTML, a code head, as for zeal, persecuting paper users everywhere, as for backing up important data, faultless (Philippians 3:4-6 if you haven’t caught on).

I’ve been working on computers for about as long as I can remember. My earliest memory involved a computer that ran at 8 Mhz in “turbo” mode. My most recent experience has been that of getting my Apple certification so I could help support our all-Mac college.

However, I wonder if all this technology is really helping us as much as we think.

I submit the hypothesis that our technological advances have made little, if any, net-contributions to the tasks we would otherwise do by hand. That is, I believe it comes out as a wash when you weigh the highly publicized advances against the ubiquitously subtle regresses.

Internet enabled classrooms are used for iChat and Facebook more often than for research purposes. For all the time and money computers save us in administration, we spend in downtime when they crash or require maintenance. For all the nicely printed purchasing request documents, we could have handwritten the same information in less than a third of the time.

Simply put, is technology the same thing as progress?

Again, I think I’ve grown accustom to the hundreds of little time-suckers, assuming that the advances somehow outweigh these frequent little problems.

I am very tempted to require hard copies of assignments for my classes. There. I said it. This just might be my Damascus Road.