“The street finds its own uses for things.”

William Gibson

When Gibson talks about this quote, he’ll usually use the example of pagers- Motorola, when they were pushing pagers in the late 1980’s and early 90’s never thought they’d become the go-to tool for drug dealers. A technology originally developed in the 1950’s (!) for doctors came to be used in a totally different way than anticipated.

We have to consider, in the contexts of our schools, how the tech that we introduce for one purpose will certainly be used for things other than we intended. The typical response to this in schools it to shut things down or lock things up. Instead, why can’t we learn from the alternate uses our students find and incorporate those uses into our classrooms? Why can’t we accept the inevitable?