UPDATE: This is part of a series of blog posts on "Resilient Education", how Higher Education should respond to climate change and peak oil. Check out the other articles and related resources on Delicious under the #resilienteducation tag or subscribe via RSS to the series here.
Thanks to @josswinn and @HallyMk1 for kick-starting this!
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Even by Google's standards, Chrome OS is a very large rock to drop in the tech pool. Ben Parr has a pleasingly detailed analysis of what's driving Google into the OS business.
Chrome OS sees applications move from your hard drive to 'The Cloud'. Parr's take is that the drive for this "paradigm shift" is to enable you, the user, to spend more time on the internet and so consuming Google's advertising. Apparently, Chrome OS loads up within seconds, allowing you to get on the internet super-fast. Time = money. What the article doesn't mention (unsurprisingly) is whether this move to cloud-computing is sustainable in a world of constrained energy resources. Which got me thinking about how we actually use our computers. How much time does the average person spend using apps other than browsers? I'm not even writing this post in a word processor, just as a draft email before sending to Posterous. If we want to find something out, we'll probably ask Google or Wikipedia before visiting the library. We're already carrying out a huge amount of our daily business online. What the Chrome OS story does is illuminate our wider reliance on an 'always on' energy supply, rather than the Fordist method of embedding a finite amount of energy in a 'thing'. Something old-fashioned like, say, a 'book' ;) No room here to explore the implications of this for education in depth, but this observation will hopefully kick things off.The tech crowd all love playing with the latest toy/software/app/OS/social media etc. But what I suspect we all know deep down is that it *doesn't really matter*. As always, it's the message not the medium that's important. It's just that making a big bet on technology to deliver our message is increasingly looking just that. A bet. And an ill-thought one at that.