A Paperless World

March 19, 2008

2008-03-19_1513, originally uploaded by nooccar.

I was checking out Laura Ballard’s blog today, and I saw a link to a paperless world. This concept always reminds me of Asimov’s idea that books will eventually be dead, and I am the first to tell you that I love the smell of old books but the idea of a paperless world is really intriguing. When I started working in Arizona at Casa Grande Union High School, most handouts, flyers, memos, etc… were all through email. We had very little paper we had to pick up from our mailboxes, and this was nice. See, I am a pack rat, and I actually have three full file cabinets (one at home dating back to high school research papers), and two full tupperware containers in the garage. So this nonpaper at work, was cool.

Then I went to McClintock High School where nothing came through on email. Everything was paperpaperpaper! Ugh! I hated it. That principal hates paperwork, so I have no idea why we got so many papers. But it was cool because that district assigned every teacher a laptop when we got the job, so I never ever used our home computers for anything. That was fun.

So now I am at Basha High School now, where they don’t give me a cool little laptop, but I am fine with that since the wife bought me a MacBook Pro last summer. I do get some paperwork, but I also get a lot of email (on a system called GroupWise, which is REALLY proprietary). There are good things and bad there, but I also now have a ScanSnap Scanner, so more and more of that paperwork is becoming searchable PDFs, and I love tossing away old articles I’ve annotated and cannot bear to lose. Woohoo!

The New York Times recently had an article on the future of a paperless world, and the graph above suggests that wealthy countries use less and less paper as digital technologies gain traction, while countries like China have a faster growing appetite for. This graph is a few years old, and I wonder how it’s changed.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer typed homeworks, things turned in online, and I hate to write anything with a pen & paper. Nada. Give me a text file on my computer, which is always with me.

Posted in technology