When I’m playing “What if?” and I come up with this scenario, I imagine someone tripping over a chord and the entire country making that cartoony power-down sound.
As you’ve likely heard, the Internet’s broken on the west side of Africa. Something called SEACOM went down and that was that.
It’s not quite what you’d like to have happen when you’re on Day 1 of a week of workshops about technology in education. If you’re minutes away from leading a session signing 25 teachers up for their first-ever e-mail accounts, it’s certainly not the news you’d like to get.
We’re not even going to consider the implications if the country in which you happen to be staying is hosting one of the most highly watched sporting events in the world.
Anyway, someone tripped over a cord up north and brrroooooooooo. 🙁
The session I was supposed to lead at the end of the day became the second session of the day – sans my google docs-stored notes.
You roll with it.
I gave the scenario a few posts ago of tech leaders from around a state showing up to a conference and losing connectivity.
Now, imagine a few countries lost that connectivity. Imagine the Eastern Seaboard of the United States broke their connection. Chaos, right?
Here, we’re moving on and teaching Photo Story 3 and discussing how to get communities surrounding schools with computer labs to take ownership of those resources.
Seriously.
The Internet’s broken and no one has set fire to a single car. I want to run into the computer lab and scream, “Don’t you understand what’s happening?! Don’t you get there’s no way to talk about it on Facebook?!”
Yes, I’m convinced the connectedness and access the Internet affords will exponentially provide South Africa educational opportunities educators and learners have no access to now. I have no doubts.
I wouldn’t be spending more than a month here if I weren’t certain.
Access will make things better.
I wonder, though, if access will become the dependence seen across the U.S.
If we had the Internet to do over again, would we?