“…if you took a surgeon from the year 1900 and put them in a year 2014 operating room they wouldn’t even recognize their workplace, let alone be able to operate, while if you took a teacher from 1900 and put them in a year 2014 classroom they’d pick up the chalk and get right to work. Why is this so true?”
While this is true, weighing health care with education in the context of their equal adoption of technology is not necessarily the dividing characteristic. In health care, new understandings of human anatomy and medical procedures have forced the requirement for new environments and tools. As the understanding of human behavior has gone relatively unchanged over the past decade and it has only been over the last thirty or so years that attention has been spent on the cognitive aspect of learning, it is reasonable to suggest that the truth in the statement is more related to the pace of discovery and the critical need for adoption of new understandings in medicine, rather than to the inherent value society places on each social enterprise or the willingness of each discipline to adopt new technology. It is the relatively recent renaissance in understanding learning and the proliferation of technology that changes the perception of the need for the adoption of new technologies in education that provide more efficient or effective learning experiences or environments. With this change in perception, comes new opportunities for innovation and ventures in the emerging educational technology market.