Upstream cost, downstream savings

 

Now and again it strikes me that a picture in my house is hanging crooked, and each time I notice this I take a few seconds to straighten that picture out.

Conceptually I know that if I took five minutes, got a hammer, a nail, a pencil, and a level, I could attach a second nail and never have to straighten the damn picture again.

But like most people, I never seem to have the upstream time it takes to realize downstream time savings. Human nature, I suppose.

That is probably the major reason technology is so difficult to get busy educators to use. Convincing someone that learning to create a pdf file of an often-requested document, load it to a website, and create a link to it - thereby saving all the time it takes to locate, print, and send the document manually over and over again - is a tough sell.

About as tough as it is to convince me to go get the hammer.

from Machines are the Easy Part; People are the Hard Part (free download)