ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, a marvellous story by Lewis Carroll (1865), Alice and the Red Queen were running very fast hand in hand, and still the queen kept crying “Faster!”. The most curious part of the thing was that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. When they finally stopped, Alice protested:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else–if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

WAS REMINDED of this story while scanning through thousands of lines in my Bloglines account. Most were recent blog entries on topics related to my work — education, instructional design, psychology, technology, and so on. This is a treasure trove or bottomless pit of … — depending on how one looks at it.

It’s amazing how a story written about 140 years ago could ring so uncannily true of life in a really fast world. The “Red Queen” could be some people or certain situations. For example, as John Seely Brown had observed at an SMU seminar in March earlier, people working in the information technology industry today have to “keep running faster and faster” just to keep up-to-date. New and much more advanced hardware and software technologies keep emerging at such a fantastic rate — with more promising features and more new-fangled ways of doing things.

At work, we have been introducing so many new tools to the academic staff in our institution that i’ve wondered several times, “How many of these tools are really necessary? If tech-savvy people like us are only playing catch-up while working on these full-time, how do non-tech-savvy people feel having to learn all these part-time while working on other things full-time? When will we stop running, take stock of what’s happening and stop letting technology (or expediency or some mob) lead pedagogy (or the rest of us rank-and-file) by the nose?”

(See also Will R.’s Happy Overload Day post and David Weinberger’s “No, I’m Not Keeping Up With Your Blog” post.)