Well I must say I had a revealing time purchasing a new laptop this weekend. I had already picked out my laptop, and while it is not a Ferrari in terms of processing speed and power, it certainly is a Honda Civic, or Honda Accord, or Chevy Impala in terms of robustness and reliability.
I wanted to purchase this particular model, but I suppose that it is such a big thing about the new puma chip, that the young gentleman did not want to sell it to me. He wanted to sell me a computer, that although faster would not have met my needs the way my new laptop does.
I want to do a lot of things with this Computer, of course surf the web, and office productivity. I also want to have fun on it, work on cool designs in photoshop, lay out pages in coldfusion, do ID movies in captivate, and do a little bit of light video work.
This young man tried to sell me a Tablet. I didn't need a tablet, and I did not want to purchase one just because it had a dual core 2.20 ghz processor, as opposed to my 1.86 processor.
WHY? because there are some things on this laptop that I wanted, and needed, which precluded me getting what may have been a Ferrari, and I instead chose a slower machine with a better balance of features, like a bigger hard drive, 32 bit os, (so I can run older software), the dedicated graphics card, etc.
What does this have to do with faculty support? Quite simply, I hope that I am not like that salesman, that AMD fan boy that tries to encourage people to do things that are "faster, better, and cooler," even though they might not need "faster, better, or cooler". They may need "reliable, robust, and time tested".
I know that we all have our things that we are huge fans of, and there is a fine line between pushing our own Instructional Design agenda, or preference to work with cool new tools for faculty, when sometimes, what they may need is that pared down, simpler solution, which still has punch, and still works very nicely for them.
This is just something for any Instructional Designer, or anyone who does technical work with faculty to think about.
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3 comments:
There is always someone out there who thinks that they know what you need today, tomorrow, and for months to come. It's interesting, because my philosophy has always been "buy cheap, buy often" ... who knows what innovation will emerge next week!
My cousin just bought a new laptop, for school, and he started asking me about different laptops. He was looking at the COOLEST, BEST, and most expensive laptops. The had real nice words in the specs description. stuff like "anywhere wireless" and "triple-quad protection against thing a ma bobs" and there might have also been something about a real good graphic card.
So I asked my cousin what he needs his laptop for. "oh, school. Going into grad school, I'll use it for internet and writing papers".
ARGGG!
that's all I could say.
My grandma uses her computer for a little bit of internet, emails and writing documents. She is using a Pentium 2, with 256 RAM, and that's about the best thing I could say about it.
Always choose a computer according to what you need. Plan to replace a computer every year. Spend accordingly. The best computers of 2008 will be the worse computers of 2009. that is how fast this market goes.
(darn, sorry... i'm in a chatty mood today. long responses on both blogs)
Damtiela,
No problem, thanks for the repsonse!! I enjoyed reading what you have to say. I very much agree with your ideology when it comes to computer shopping. It's really funny how the techies get it, and the non-techies are truly CLUELESS that they do not need that porsche, but would do just fine with the pontiac!
The bells and whistles are great if you are doing hard core video editing/gaming, but if you are not doing these things, you will barely notice.
And your gram is making it on a Pentium II with 256 MB of ram and doing similar work to what he will be doing.
I agree with you, with getting what you need and planning on replacing often! I got a good deal, and 1 month into my laptop purchase I am enjoying it quite thoroughly.
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