New tools resemble old tools - not necessarily in design or purpose or function - but in how we use them. And how we use them is more often than not determined by our comfort with custom and our need to maintain predictable levels of control in our lives and our work. So we use word processors like typewriters, eschewing their unfamiliar and complicated attributes.
Some tools appear to be new, but in practice replicate the paradigms of the tools they were designed to replace. Antonio Dias de Figuereido, Professor of Informatics Engineering and Information Systems at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal put this forcefully in a 2003 call for chapters of a book he was editing, MANAGING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL SETTINGS: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT.
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