Technology Taxes

When was the last time your organization adopted a technology that made your life better? As in, solved an actual problem, saved you time, or improved an important outcome?

I’m not sure this has ever happened to me.

When I started teaching here at the University of Montana, I was excited at the prospect of a paperless course. I could put all the required materials on our LMS (learning management system), enabling easy access and near zero monetary cost for students. I could run my assignments and tests through that LMS and post grades there, too. Students could monitor their progress and stay on top of things.

The more I relied on this platform, the more I tried to optimize it. Gradually, the platform’s capabilities and limitations started to influence my course design, perhaps crowding out what I thought was best for the students. Students grew reliant on the LMS for instant feedback on their grades, eroding the need to refer to the grading schedule in the syllabus and use their own brains to calculate a simple weighted average.

This particular LMS has been vulnerable to outages at inopportune times—like during finals week. This puts major stress on just about everyone.

There are other examples like this. A technology gets adopted and then relied on and then entrenched. The effort and expense it requires becomes a tax. When some problem arises, the default is to find another technology to fix it. This leads to more subscription fees, more constraints, more vulnerabilities, more share of work allocated to managing the tech, and ultimately, more technology aimed at solving the problems created by technology.

I acknowledge that nothing is either all benefit or all cost, but my view of the balance has shifted.

What do you think?