Justified Outrage?

When people think about the impact technology has had on industry, it isn't hard to pick out a few obvious examples where tech has made a huge impact. I think one area that a lot of people tend to overlook is education. The fact is, the changes technology has made in the past couple of decades has been quite staggering.

I'm not even talking about devices in students hands, I'm talking about infrastructure and all kinds of other things that happen behind the scenes that most people never even consider.

I'm a bit sad I got into ed-tech when I did. That isn't to say I am sad I went into IT, but there was a time shortly before I started working in the schools where it was kind of the wild west as far as tech was concerned. There was lot more money back then (whether that is good or bad), and people were kind of learning as they went. Any crazy idea was fair game and like I said, I wasn't there, but I feel like the climate was just a lot more relaxed. All those unreasonable expectations and government oversight weren't mucking up the works.

For example, when I started working at my current position, two of our schools were connected to the main campus by T1 lines. Pretty fast for the time, but painfully slow by today's standards. Think about it, the average home Internet speed right now is 214 to 305 Mbps according to a quick Google search. A T1 line maxed out at somewhere just over 1.5 Mbps.

These were the times when a couple of guys would decide "hey, lets buy a big spool of fiber and run it between our IDF's (data closets). There wasn't a concern about standards or regulations or codes, they just got together on a radom Saturday and made it happen. Oddly enough, that fiber was still working fifteen years after I took the job here. The only reason we upgraded was so we could move up to a 10Gb backbone for our network.

I actually had a vendor come in to check the old fiber to make sure it was still good and while they said it was fine, they couldn't even identify the type of fiber it was because it was so old.

More importantly, I remember a time when I could make a decision (a tech decision) and I didn't have to justify why I made that decision for the district. I'm still on the fence about whether it was more a lack of knowledge or an inherent trust that made people just take me at my word, but sadly that seems to be going out the window. If you read my post on Monday, I think it's pretty clear that people aren't getting smarter.

I think there is a big difference between understanding technology and being familiar with technology. Just because you can use it doesn't mean you understand it. In the same vein, these days people seem to be making decisions based on what is easy, not on what is prudent.

If you have been keeping track, the number of cyber attacks against public school districts has skyrocket over the past decade. Between 2016 and 2022 there were over 1600 publicly disclosed incidents. Education has become one of the top five targeted sectors. In fact, the number of incidents between 2022 and 2023 increased two fold.

As you can imagine, for that reason security is pretty important to me. I've made clear my concerns time and again, yet it seems I am constantly having to defend my decisions when it comes to assigning specific privileges on the network.

Sadly, I have kind of become used to being considered "difficult" because I won't just make things happen. It's super frustrating to have a teacher come to me and ask for something and when I tell them no they say "well the principal said it was okay". Of course the principal said that, because they aren't the ones that have to make it happen, and they didn't consider all of the things their decision could potentially break or all the security concerns it creates.

Tech isn't alone in this, even my wife who has been successfully providing social work services to students for over 20 years has found herself having to justify her decisions or actions as of late.

I think this speaks to a bigger issue of not just overall distrust of pretty much anything, but also the lack of awareness of the world around you and just general laziness. It's funny because Hive account@coinjoe wrote a post yesterday about how much confrontation there is in the world, but as I think about it, it's not that there is so much confrontation, it's more that it is misplaced.

It blows my mind how much people get away with in the workplace because someone is afraid to have that hard conversation with them. So they just let the behavior continue. What's even more scary, is that I am probably guilty of this as well. It seems to have become the culture, question and distrust, but never reach a resolution.

I wonder if the previous generation felt the same way about us as they were getting ready to leave the workforce?