Today I had an interesting experience at a faculty meeting. Our school is promoting a new discipline plan using ClassDojo. For those of you who do not know what it is, it is a really cool way of documenting students' behavior online. A teacher can upload his or her class into ClassDojo and add or take away points based on behavior. The students are displayed as avatars and when points are given or taken away from the student, it sends an e-mail message to the parent with a description of the reason for the gained or lost point. Okay...so I know that information is not relevant to the topic, but what happened next is. After being trained on ClassDojo, one of the teachers said, "there is also an app for it if you have an iPhone." That comment was quickly followed with another comment that sounded eerily familiar, "there is also an app for the Droid users." Immediately the air was filled with comments about who had what phone and it became a battle of iPhone users verses Droid users. This was a classic example of what David Thornburg describes as "Red Queens". A Red Queen is when two competing companies who offer basically the same technology, compete in a way in which both companies shoot to the top and leave other companies behind (Laureate Education, 2008).
Recently, I was given an assignment where I was asked to view an older Sci-Fi pick and compare the technology used in the movie to the technology used today. When asked to complete the assignment, I immediately went online to see if I could find it for free. I spent some time searching and was able to find a site that would allow for a free download of the film. I will tell you the truth, the download put a virus on my computer, and I ended up going to see if I could find the film in a store, but if that had not happened, it would have never crossed my mind to leave my house.
The notion of getting a movie from a video store has almost been erased from my mind mostly because the video stores themselves have been erased from my community. I can drive down the street and see where all of the old Blockbusters and Movie Gallery’s used to stand. More and more people are subscribing to Netflix and other sites where it is easy to download movies.
There is a battle between the DVD and internet streamed movies and it appears that the DVD, as much as they hold fond memories for me, is beginning to lose the race. Bins upon bins of DVD’s have been marked down. Movies that people would pay $15-$20 for are now in the middle of Walmart in the $5 bin. Blockbuster and Movie Gallery donated many of the DVD’s to Redbox machines that will allow you to view some of the newest releases for less than $2. This is happening all in the effort to try and keep up with Netflix, which will allow you to view a limitless amount of movies for less than $20 a month (the price that we use to pay for one DVD). I do believe that soon the DVD will become a symbol of technology history as streaming movies online becomes more popular.
Thornburg, D. (2008c). Red Queens, butterflies, and strange attractors: Imperfect lenses into emergent technologies. Lake Barrington, IL: Thornburg Center for Space Exploration.
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