Enough Tools for Now

Based on my post yesterday on Missed Opportunities, I received a really interesting email. The basic gist of the email could be summarized as:

Don’t we have enough tools for now?

At some level, this seems like a great question. We are already swimming in tools and new tools arrive faster than we can understand them much less try them. It seems somehow reasonable to simply say, let’s stop looking at new tools for a while and just get better with what we already have.

In Work Skills Keeping Up?, I discuss the Tilde Effect. And in some ways, there’s a really good point being made that there is no way we can truly keep up with the flood of tools and solutions. So, we have to make smart choices about how to stay up to speed.

Still I’ll stick with:

The bottom line for the Tilde Effect is that we live in a time of incredible innovation that directly affect the methods we use to work and learn. Our work skills cannot sit still. There's a lot of discussion about 21st century skills to be taught in schools, but what about the rest of us?

And the focus of that post is really about general metacognitive tools and methods for knowledge workers. If you are talking about tools, methods, analysis, etc. for technologies that impact learning and performance AND you believe you have a responsibility to help with design of appropriate solutions, then I don’t think you can say we have “enough tools for now.”

The better question is “How do you appropriately balance the need to stay up-to-speed with the fact that you cannot possibly spend enough time to truly stay up-to-speed?”

Back to the post from yesterday for more discussion on exactly that.