Chalkbeat reports on a meeting in New York City where educators gathered to learn about the XQ-Robin Hood competition for “innovative” schools. First they watched a flashy video claiming that American high schools haven’t changed in 100 years, the usual disrupter claptrap. Then, after hearing that schools are obsolete, they were urged to reinvent them.
But XQ and education department officials included few specifics about what problems the city is hoping these schools will help solve, what future jobs they should be preparing students for, or the criteria that will be used to pick the winners. (Education historians have also disputed the idea that schools haven’t changed at all in the past century.)
Little has been said about where the new schools, 10 of which will be high schools, could be housed or how many students they will serve. Many educators in attendance said they were just learning about the competition for the first time and expressed interest in addressing basic needs, such as more social services and better support for students with disabilities — a contrast with much of the event’s rhetoric about reinventing school.
In the linked article, Historian Jack Schneider scoffed at the idea that high schools have been static for a century and are waiting for a billionaire to redesign them:
“A century ago, teachers were largely untrained and oversaw very large classes in which rote memorization was the rule. Students brought their own books from home and the curriculum varied from school to school. Courses like zoology and technical drawing were common and classical languages still maintained a strong foothold. Students of color, when educated, were largely denied equal access, and special education did not exist. It was a different world.”
XQ is offering “only” $500,000 to reinvent the American high school, which is cheap-o because the last time XQ (Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs) held a competition, she offered $10 million to the winners of her competition. Four have already failed. If they couldn’t reinvent the high school with $10 million, how does she expect NYC educators to do it for $500,000?
XQ offers advice about how to build a team for your innovative school. Only one educator needed.
Here is an innovative idea for Mrs. Jobs. Open a private school with no tuition. Demonstrate your best, most innovative ideas. Show the world the results of your innovation. Do you have any innovative ideas?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OK. I’m willing to grant the notion that in some respects, schooling hasn’t changed much. From time immemorial, education has been about older people who know things sharing with younger people, in personal interactions, what they think most important to know. It’s been about mentoring. It’s been intensely personal. This is an altogether good thing.
Now, a lot of investor money is going into a “digital transition” to “disrupt” all that. Instead of human-relationship-centric education, we are to have depersonalized education via software. Put 400 kids in a room with some programmed learning worksheets on a screen gussied up with “Study Buddy” avatars, overseen by one person with five weeks’ training from TFA who is there to make sure the machines are operating.
Follow the money. In the 19th century, the big money was all made in finance and heavy industry (steel, railroad, oil). Today, it’s still made in finance, but a lot of it has also been made in computer tech, and a lot of investors who made their money in the digital economy are wedded to the idea of it as the solution to everything. Remember when Google Glass and Chippy the Microsoft Paperclip personal assistant were going to Change Everything? Remember how much better your life was going to be? (These types–Gates, Jobs–make the TED Talk circuit and lap up the “change everything” stuff.)
Pixels are a lot cheaper than paper (print textbooks) and facilities and teachers’ salaries are. And national “standards” are meant to enable a few ed tech monopolists to dominate the transition from print and teachers to education by machine. Good enough for Prole children and easier, much, much, much easier to centralize for command and control.
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I think that you have left out an important bit in the history of education.
I do agree that at the beginning it was about older people who knew things talking to younger people. Technology change, however, created the possibility that younger people could learn from older people who lived many hundreds of miles away, people whom students would never laid eyes on or who had died many years before instead of only those standing before the younger people. This was a profound change, one that was brought about by the technology of the written language and inexpensive printing.
This technology has been so central to education that we devote the bulk of primary school to enabling students to both access and create work in this technology, and are extremely concerned if they are not able to access it, labeling these people as illiterate.
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I don’t recall having written a history of education here, TE. But oh yes, by all means, TE. Let’s get rid of teachers and school buildings altogether. So expensive. Let’s just make sure that the kids are plugged in. That will be sufficient.
OK. That won’t work. So let’s put them in rooms with a thousand kids and one proctor who can make sure the kids are gritfully completing their worksheets on the screen.
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And why on Earth would people need you to teach them economics when they can just go read Samuelson and Piketty? Or better yet, they can buy Economics for Future Dentists online from Pear$on?
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Bob,
Do you think the written word is unimportant, irrelevant to education? I don’t really understand why you ridicule literacy, or as you call it, being plugged into the written word.
I made no claims of sufficiency, just necessity. I am surprised that an ELA teacher does not think that accessing the written word is necessary for education.
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I don’t think Bob said that.
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I was trying to make sense of Bob’s response. After all, I said nothing about getting rid of teachers.
When Bob talked about being plugged in, when he talked about worksheets, did you think he was not about learning to access and produce the written word? Do you not think that accessing and producing the written world is one of the paramount focuses of education?
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“Do you not think that accessing and producing the written world is one of the paramount focuses of education?”
Yes, of course. As are mathematics, the arts, physical education, the sciences, vocational programs, social studies, history, and philosophy. And without access to the spoken word/sign language/PECS, communication devices, etc all of those skills would be much more difficult to convey.
In tandem with those subject areas in education, and as important as accessing the spoken word, is the overlying concept of teaching socialization skills and a sense of civic responsibility. Ethics. Ingraining those skills and concepts requires a hands on, real time approach that can only be supplied through the interactions of a teacher and a class. No technology/book (you’re right: books are early tech) will ever replace the immediate interactions that are required to teach those skills.
I think you were misunderstood, TE. I wasn’t sure of your intent, myself. I’m sure you know of the push to replace teachers with technology. A very present and real concern for anyone who understands the needs of children, teens, and young adults. It sounded as though you were pointing towards that path in some ways.
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Sorry about the testiness, TE. I am sick to death of the defenses of the indefensible ed tech in our schools. I have reviewed enormous amounts of this stuff for clients. It’s pretty awful, by and large. And teachers are essential. I’m defending your job here, TE, and not just because it’s your job.
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And, ofc, the decline in vocational education at the high-school level, in the United States, has been PROFOUND, and very, very costly to the well-being of a LOT of students not suited to the one-size-fits-all Deform model. It’s ironic that the Deformers accuse our public schools of following a “factory model” when that’s precisely what they call for, uniform milling of Prole children according to invariant tests and standards.
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But this reinvent schooling stuff is not about improving education. It is about centralizing and computerizing it because there is a lot of money to be made in doing so.
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when the words “a lot” could be both capitalized and written in bold script
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YUP. Pear$on just unloaded its courseware division, but it held onto its profitable K-12 te$ting and virtual $chool divisons.
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The reinvention stuff is about glossy marketing and eye catching buzz words like “historic visionary” and “moonshot teammate.” We need Randy Rainbow to satirize this claptrap. You’re right. It is about access to students. I’ll bet student privacy was not part of the presentation.
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Yup. But we have SomeDAM, the Poet Laureate of the Resistance.
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Thank you retired teacher. The people marketing this nonsense have no clue about education. All they can offer is satire-worthy talk about visonaries and moonshots and so on.
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The only reason dilettantes like Jobs-Powell get any purchase is because the profession is led by lightweights, frauds, ideologues and hacks, not serious scholars.We will get nowhere until we find more serious scholars of education like Diane. We need scholars who can remind us of the history of education –what’s worked and what hasn’t. We keep repeating the same mistakes because we’re ignorant of this history. We need scholars who know the science of education. What does cognitive science say? What do “gold standard” studies of pedagogy tell us? You’d think our education leaders know this stuff, but they don’t –or they ignore it to favor their pet ideas. It’s truly scandalous. The problem with education is that it lacks genuinely qualified leaders (sham degrees from sham programs don’t count).
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I taught for over three and a half decades. Only near the end of my career did I see corporations express any interest in it. This was post NCLB after corporations and billionaires saw the potential for financial gain for themselves. Most of the legitimate research is being ignored or buried, and the wealthy keep churning out their fake education news. It is the money fueling the momentum, not the substance.
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It strikes me that the problem is far worse than the lack of intelligence on the part of the leadership. I think the corruption embodied in the industries,that make money off the process of schooling must shoulder a lion’s share of the blame. Although it is pernicious for school administration to fail to understand what has failed in the past, it is far more debilitating to the process for those same people to look at their company’s bottom line as the be all and end all of the process.
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There has long been, in the educational materials industry, a lot of backroom corruption–state education officials, especially in adoption states, who would secure a big adoption for a publisher and then move into a lucrative management or consulting position with the same publisher. Years ago, one publisher, owned by a company that also owned a big movie studio, put the entire California state adoption committee on a boat and sailed it down the coast for a tour of the studio. State adoption has always been really bad for teachers and kids. It encouraged consolidation and lack of competition in the textbook materials industry because the significant costs of competing for an adoption acted as a barrier to entry for smaller, innovative publishers, as did the excessive demands of state adoption committees for long, complex lists of product components that only the biggest publishers could afford to produce. If you were to go back to the 1970s, a major basal textbook program would consist of two pieces: a student text and a perfect-bound (paperback) teacher’s guide. Now, these programs typically contain many hundreds of pieces, most of which teachers never use. Two decades ago, I met with the 60+ state Language Arts Coordinators in Florida and told them, if you want to end up with one or two players in the whole textbook industry, keep doing what you are doing–asking for that long list of “free” components. And here we are, today, with two big basal K-12 publishers left, Houghton and Pearson. And both are in financial trouble. Pearson just unloaded its courseware division in a fire sale. Houghton has had declining stock prices for years. Their competitive model (erecting those barriers to entry) cut into their own margins at the same time that school budgets were plummeting after the 2007-2008 crash and significant funds were being diverted by the states and districts to paying for testing and test prep.
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Roy,
No doubt. But I’m thinking of people like those who lead our union’s huge professional development outfit who never question Common Core, or those who created California’s new history frameworks that prescribe inquiry learning, but have never read the relevant research on inquiry. These leaders are hacks. They are ignorant and incurious, like our hack president, Trump.
This is not new. In 1914, William Henry Maxwell complained that the educational theorists of the time: “Unmindful of the lessons of educational history, regardless of the universal rules of logic, they proclaim the validity of untested theories and untried ideals, and denounces as traitors and malingerers all who do not agree with them.” (from Diane’s Left Back pp. 113-114) Sound familiar?
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Now hold on…hold on…ah said: hold ON a minute, thar!
You’re saying that greed, avarice, and stupidity preceded our recent generations!?
Kidding of course…but I keep hoping for evolutionary change. Not regression.
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“XQ is offering “only” $500,000 to reinvent the American high school”
I think that half-million will go to whoever comes up with a model that fits Success Academy and to make that happen they will have to go back further than 100 years to copy the Prussian Model of Obedience that most of if not all of the U.S. public education system left behind decades ago.
Eva’s Success Academy is the perfect example of the Prussian Model of Obedience.
And here is an example of the modern public schools that left behind the Prussian Model of Obedience decades ago:
How do I know this? I was a public school teacher for thirty years (1975-2005) and I was encouraged to teach my students to be critical thinkers, creative thinkers, and problem-solvers back when I started teaching in 1975. Even though that started to change before I left teaching (pressure from the top down to return to the Prussian Model of Obedience), I never stopped teaching my students how to think instead of obeying blindly without question.
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XQSuperschool.org brands itself with an “iconic character to address complex ideas around nostalgia.”
How can the response be anything but sorrow, when a person learns that the widow Steve Jobs’ brand, for a concept that rejects democracy, features a representation of a Tuskegee Airman?
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In short, what this “reinventing schools” stuff is all about is SaaS, Software as a Subscription–a lucrative model for looting that part of the public treasury that goes to education the children of folks who are not oligarchs.
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cx: to “training” the children
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The pamphlet that XQ gave out was truly an embarrassing display of everything that is wrong with Jobs and her little band of overpaid cronies.
On the other hand, it seems as if a lot would fall to Karin Goldmark, the DOE official who is overseeing this. Do people who know the DOE trust her or do they also think she is secretly pro-charter?
I’m still at the wait and see stage. I would absolutely be more concerned if XQ was funding NYC charters, but given that the 10 schools that they fund have to be public schools overseen by the DOE, I’m curious how this will play out over the next month or two when the first general ideas get $25,000 “planning grants” and the agenda they may or may not be pushing becomes more clear.
I really, really hope that someone offers up a small class size school.
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Goldmark is a holdover from Joel Klein’s Leadership Academy. She was never a teacher, a principal, or a superintendent.
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All this said, digital curricula differ VASTLY in quality. There is, I think, a role for it to play. For example, digital formats are GREAT for demonstration purposes, for giving students access to vast libraries of texts, for allowing students to conduct “experiments,” for providing access to educational materials in remote parts of the world, and for making possible anytime, anywhere learning for people who are already intrinsically highly motivated.
Some digital curricula are really, really terrible. Many current offerings are basically sets of programmed learning modules, presented in edutainment formats (animated Flash videos and game formats are common), with pretests for placement. These tend to be heavy on the glitz and very light on substance. They can sort of work for a short time when what is to be learned is quite concrete and specific, but kids get bored with them VERY quickly. A few weeks in, and the kids would rather have all the hair on their bodies pulled out with tweezers than to fire up the product again. The purveyors of this trash push their products as magic bullets for preparing kids for tests–as test prep (though they don’t use that term).
Some are digitized versions of print textbooks that are very graphics intensive and overwhelm most personal computers systems–especially those owned by schools and by teachers who can’t afford the latest, greatest processors. These–the digitized versions of their print textbooks developed by companies like Houghton and Pearson–tend to be enormous, very, very slow, and very, very difficult and frustrating to navigate and use. They also tend to have many, many components, which is confusing, and many of those components are rarely actually used by teachers. They are also VERY expensive.
A few are courseware created specifically for presentation in HTML formats. These contain the content of a textbook but without the constant distractions of special features and substance-free graphics and slow loading times and zillions of components that one finds in the digitized Houghton and Pearson online textbooks. These are a LOT easier to use than the Houghton and Pearson online textbooks because they were built for the web. Some of these are remarkably good–hidden gems to be found among the offerings of some of the online virtual school companies. They proceed, step-by-step, coherently, through a course of study. Some of the best of these are online voc ed offerings. However, virtual schools tend to have low completion rates and their online lessons aren’t a substitute for having a great teacher.
And then there are the few products that are meant to be used as motivating, occasional supplementals, like the film strips and slide shows of yore. These vary enormously in quality.
Much of the online curricula suffers greatly from being so focused on generating “data.” Lean on this “data” a little bit, and it will turn out to be purest numerology. No, the fact that little Yolanda answered 4 of 5 questions right after that Flash Video on “Making Inferences from Text” doesn’t mean that she has now “mastered” making inferences from texts.
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Yes, I can’t imagine using on-line curricula in ELA or frankly any humanities.
But where I do see a value to it as a parent is in higher level mathematics. I don’t think many people don’t realize how advanced the math curriculum is these days. The Algebra 1 classes are teaching concepts that go well beyond what I learned in high school in a supposedly “honors” Algebra 1 class and in NYC, all students — even the most math-challenged — are supposed to master that in 9th grade.
And, we all know that students grasp concepts at different rates. Sometimes it may take a week for one kid to really understand some basic math concept that another kid can learn in a day, but then that first kid can speed ahead because he really has learned it and the second kid needs more time on a later concept.
But it seems as if math curriculum was designed to teach concepts at a standard rate that clearly doesn’t work for every kid. And as soon as a kid hits that point where the teacher’s lesson didn’t get through or the homework isn’t making sense, they are lost. Yet meanwhile the rest of the class is moving ahead learning more concepts that are even harder to learn for the kid who hasn’t fully grasped the earlier one. I saw a middle school math program which used computers to individualize math lessons, but once a student did understand it, he could move ahead as quickly as he wanted. And teachers still taught mini-lessons to small groups of kids who were at the same place, but that group keeps changing as some students move on as they have grasped it and other students remain because they still need practice with the concept before moving on.
I’ve watched my kid view a Kahn Academy video of a teacher with a blackboard and chalk explaining something. And watching it again because it didn’t click the first time. Or watching a different video with a different teacher whose slightly different way of explaining the concept that makes it more comprehensible.
What I liked is that the computer did not replace the teacher. It simply allowed the teacher to teach in smaller groups of students who were ready to learn the new concept at that particular time that was right for them. And it allowed students whose parents can’t pay for private tutors to have access to on-line teachers whose explanation of how to do the new problems is easier for that particular student to understand.
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yes, yes, yes, yes, yes
(Cue the attacks from the math teachers, here, on the quality of the mathematics in some of the Khan videos. But that aside, your points are, I think, important.)
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It’s too bad that Sal Kahn’s math and computer science vids are now buried under the testing and data generation crap added as a result of the Common Core-y push from his sponsor, Gates. The site was SO MUCH BETTER when it consisted ONLY of his vids, which I thought of as great instructional supplements, useful for remediation, and great for self-motivated learners.
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Yes, good point about Khan Academy. The nice thing is that there is no need to use Khan. You can just google a math concept and there are dozens of videos of people teaching it! I’m sure some of them are awful but lots of people started doing the same thing Sal Khan did and posting videos. Nowadays some are using animation but I think the teacher with a chalkboard actually works the best and those videos are out there, too. And maybe those animated ones work for some kids so who am I to judge if it works for them?
It would be useful for a math teacher to do a review of which videos they believe would be helpful to students struggling with a math concept.
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I posted a reply that disappeared so posting again.
There are lots of free videos on youtube now so I should not have said Khan Academy, I should have said simply googling a math concept and watching a video (or maybe two or three) of different people trying to teach it is a helpful resource.
Also, I have a relative who teaches high school math to students and one of the problems that the administrators want the teachers to get through the curriculum each week while the teachers in the trenches can see that many students aren’t learning it and need to learn it to be able to move on. It’s not that SOME students can’t learn it, but what happens to the rest, especially when the kids are low-income as opposed to in affluent schools where the exact same problem exists and parents deal with it by hiring tutors.
I know so many families who resorted to math tutors at some point or another during high school. Sometimes it was just to get over the hump and sometimes it was longer term so the student could keep up with the curriculum. And these were bright and motivated kids who were decent in math and had good math fundamentals! But high school math these days is a different level of difficulty and students are not widgets who learn at exactly the same rate each week.
So I think that many math teachers recognize this problem. And it isn’t just about tracking kids, because the issue is that kids may learn one concept very quickly and struggle with the next two concepts and then learn the 4th concept very quickly again. it’s just about “personalizing” the learning, to use a much hated phrase that in the case of high school math, might actually make sense.
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NYC Parent: “one of the problems that the administrators want the teachers to get through the curriculum each week ”
This is a HUGE problem with the Common Core. Proponents say that the Common [sic] Core [sic] isn’t a curriculum, but in mathematics in certainly is a curriculum map, and in this era, kids are routinely forced into instruction that they aren’t ready for. Kids differ and are on different schedules, but the CC$$ are invariant.
And, btw, the CC$$ in ELA are also being used as a curriculum map by almost all the ELA curriculum developers now, which is an utter disaster leading to completely incoherent (and backward and trivial) curricula. That’s a LONG story.
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Oh you are reminding me of what I love about the internet. I was a kid who was raised on Oz books, & an image I retained was Glinda [the Good (Witch)’s Great Book of Records. It was a huge thing on a pedestal, just like the OED, and as you looked at it, it was printing new pages line by line – everything that was happening, every new idea added to knowledge, spewing forth on the page.
That essentially describes my daily Google News page – which is so bubbling with info that I have to restrain it to filter the subjects in which I am most interested. And that author (L Frank Baum) described/ predicted it within a fairy tale written over a century ago…
I suspect that kids today – though I wouldn’t stop them reading the 21stC version of Glinda’s Magic Book of Records – will be far more prepared to glean something, reading there, with a parallel reading, starting as soon as parents can read to them [& continuing at their own pleasure, as soon as they can read] , of centuries of narratives written by those luminaries who interpret their own lives, and project their wisdom of the human experience into imagining the lives of others now into the future. This is how we learn: through imagination. That’s how we factor in the endless stream of data.
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It’s very interesting how literacy is changing. That’s a fascinating bit from the Oz books, Bethree. Other precedents: Mark Twain’s sci-fi story, from before there was sci-fi, “From the ‘London Times’ in 1904, written by Twain in 1898, and H. G. Wells’s discussion of the “Permanent World Encyclopedia,” written in 1937, vastly expanded in his 1938 collection of essays World Brain. And then there was Vannevar Bush, Truman’s science advisor, and his envisioned Memex, which would magnetic cards to store all the world’s knowledge and display it on a table, described in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article called “As We May Think.” But the kernel of the idea goes all the way back to the Ptolemies.
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Another potential positive use of digital technology in education is the use of this technology to develop online courses in smaller market subject areas for which there are currently few offerings–languages like Russian and Mandarin and Classical Latin; the bookwork for voc ed classes in subjects like auto mechanics, welding, and pharmacy tech; music theory for jazz players; materials and techniques in various arts, such as ceramics or calligraphy, etc. But big venture capital isn’t going to invest in such stuff, ofc, so such materials will be developed Open Source, if at all, and our schools have to become a lot less enthralled to one-size-fits-all education for these to become more significant.
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Good points, Bob.
One of the main problems with the privatization of public education is the profit motive. You won’t see much in the way of the small niche products if the number of buyers aren’t big enough (and very “big” it must be) to justify the outlay for the investors.
Truth is, though, that you’re not seeing much in the way of voc ed, pharmacy tech, etc in the world or education as is, anyway. Tech or real time. Everyone is mega focused on “College Ready” (with an aside to “and Career”) and the tests/data analysis which come with it. The school systems don’t want to spend anything significant on what’s viewed (incorrectly in my mind) as “peripheral”.
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These idiot “reformers/deformers” often choose terminology that belies their lack of understanding. The very notion that “college ready” and “career ready” are uniformly the same is absurd, and that these are thrown together in the phrase makes it quite clear that what they are after is standardization of the training of prole children: sit down, shut up, and do whatever inane test prep is put on the screen in front of you. Perfect preparation for a life of low-paid work in the service and gig economies: “Will you be taking that latte on the verandah, Mr. Gates? Ms. Walton?”
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Another SCAM!
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”I taught for over three and a half decades. Only near the end of my career did I see corporations express any interest in it. This was post NCLB after corporations and billionaires saw the potential for financial gain for themselves. Most of the legitimate research is being ignored or buried, and the wealthy keep churning out their fake education news. It is the money fueling the momentum, not the substance”
Amen.
Just another very rich person pushing her weight around. The competition/demonstration displays her ignorance. The fact that our DOE is letting her push it just shows how far we have NOT moved since the Bloomberg years of punitive disruption.
Will this s#@t never end? Too much money in the hands of too few is drowning out the voices of knowledge and sanity.
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Conglomerates (Gulf + Western, Vivendi) and equity firms (Thomas Lee) started buying up the smaller educational publishers as early as the 1980s, leading to the vast consolidation of educational publishers that we see today. One current trend: equity firms (Weld North, Nexus Capital) scooping up and combining small ed tech companies.
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“It is the money fueling the momentum, not the substance”
Yes, all that wealth buys them power and that power corrupts them absolutely. It corrupts their thinking and everything that goes with it.
But the DOE is not an independent agency. The DOE is part of the Trump administration just like it was part of the Obama and Bush admins. The DOE does what the top says. In this case, that top is DeVos because Trump is too busy being the malignant narcissist Twitter president destroying the world.
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Were the educators at the event encouraged to go to the “shop” tab at the XQSuperschool.org site?
Hebru Brantley Merchandise is featured. “The Billionaire Boys Club has admired Brantley for a while.”
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Ofc, Ms. Jobs-Powell is now in the curriculum biz, so it will not be surprising if preference is given in these awards to schools that will use curricula from firms she has invested in. She has an impressive resume–B.S. in Economics from Wharton, MBA from Stanford. She is an investor in Amplify, the online curriculum company that, after a false start with its failed tablets, is creating some high-quality materials these days. She also owns the quite liberal and anti-Trump publication The Atlantic. Unfortunately, she seems to buy into the whole Deformer narrative about charter schools, the Common [sic] Core [sic], and standardized testing and has hired Deformers as idiotic as Arne Duncan to be part of her Emerson Collective. She should know better.
Every time I read about the Common [sic] Core [sic] being “higher standards,” my reaction: haaa haaa haaaaa, hee hee, ha–OMG, I can’t stop, it hurts—ha haaaaaa ho hee hoooo haaaaa!!!!!! Please, get serious.
Again, this ed tech push is all about SaaS–changing the method of delivery of instructional materials to from print textbooks to Software as a Subscription, which is very attractive to investors because of the low production costs and the locked-in cash flows. Of course those who are looking to ca$h in with this business model are going to pretend that their real interest is reinventing schools to make them better. Thus the Orwellian language–replace human interactions with interactions with machines and call this “personalized learning” because there are digital pretests that drop kids into particular modules.
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cx: That would be Powell Jobs, not Jobs Powell.
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“Again, this ed tech push is all about SaaS–changing the method of delivery of instructional materials to from print textbooks to Software as a Subscription, which is very attractive to investors because of the low production costs and the locked-in cash flows.”
Got that right. I was tech liaison for our 6 sites for a very long time. Every year I was given a software and hardware budget. I saw the writing on the wall when the software companies stopped producing educational DVDs (which could be downloaded and used for years) and switched over to yearly subscriptions. This was quickly followed up by Apple’s discontinued production of optical drives on all its units.
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Remember when you would buy a copy of Microsoft Office and be able to use it until the OS was changed so much that it would no longer work? Now, you pay for the yearly subscription. This ends up being more expensive in the long run for you, but it evens out cash flows for the company, makes them more predictable.
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Bob, I think we can still buy the lifetime (whatever that means in a world ruled by silicone valley greed) copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student.
One time purchase for 1 device. This is what I buy instead of paying the annual fee for the full program from Microsoft Office.
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Many of the programs that I use, Lloyd, are no longer available except by subscription.
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I know. That is the reason I’m holding out as long as possible before I buy a new computer. The last time I bought a new desktop, I bought one with the fastest chip on the market and updated its graphics software and maxed out its RAM. RAM is where we work in real-time and if RAM doesn’t have enough memory for the programs we are using, our computers will time out and freeze.
As silicone valley writes larger programs that eat up more RAM, people think they have to buy new computers to keep up when usually all you have to do is max out your RAM by adding new chips if the computer you have lets you do it.
Last time I updated my desktop it was in 2005.
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Here’s a trick on the hardware side, Lloyd, to vastly extend the lifetime of a PC: open it up and coat the CPU chip with thermal paste. These machines typically fail, these days, because the CPU chip burns up.
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Thank you. I’ll have to do that.
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Needless to say, to anyone reading this, if you open up your computer and start monkeying around with it, that’s on you. It probably is a violation of your warranty, and unless you are pretty good at this kind of thing, you might want to have a professional at a computer repair shop do it for you.
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I was going to post that exact same point, Bob.
🙂
But when the warranty’s over…its all open territory.
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