Steven Spielberg once said that "technology can be our best friend" or it can be "the biggest party pooper of our lives".
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He was referring to the impact it had on humans to dream and the disruption it can cause to our own lives. The quote could also be used, to sum up, two technology errors that caused concern for many Australians.
The first was back in 2016 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics decided to offer the survey online for the first time.
By 7.30pm users were receiving an error message. It appeared the system was fighting off cyber attacks throughout the day, a software failure happened which culminated in the router failing.
It was a horror few weeks for all the ABS and Australians were given until September 23 to log back in and complete the survey. The issue is the survey still related back to the original census day of August 9.
This week it was the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority's turn to have technology cause havoc with a number of NAPLAN tests crashing and students either losing their work or forced to lodge unfinished tests. It's not likely students affected will have a chance to re-sit the test. This will be put a lot of scrutiny of the results.
Despite the criticism of the NAPLAN testing, standardised tests are useful for general commentary of the skills of students.
The test may not be ideal for individual results and formulating an improvement plan for a student given the various learning methods, but as a whole, the test can help guide schools and governments to look at areas that need improvement.
In the movies, Back to the Future II suggested we would be driving cars by 2015. While the movie, which was made in 1989, had bold plans for technology, cybersecurity and reliability have not always favoured the move to the digital sphere.
A bonus of NAPLAN being online should be the timely turnaround of results - the paper tests would be up to six months after the fact. But the data will be queried.
As we continue to embrace technology and challenge the traditional methods, we must also be willing to adapt previous practices as part of risk management.