The Chronicle of Higher Ed released its annual Almanac this week, an omnium gatherum of data on colleges and univeristies, and the data on matters technological is gathered here. Quite a lot of it is pulled from other gatherings of data, notably  the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, or ECAR, which does its own annual study of undergraduates and technology, including a survey of the students’ sense of how much (and how well) faculty use technology in teaching. The upshot is that we should not be misled by all the talk (hype?) about change and transformative practices. Yes, there are MOOCs (here and there), and they are getting lots of attention. “The reality, though, is that professors have been slow to reshape their strategies.”

For all the press attention given e-books, they account for only 1% of college bookstores’ revenue. Courses using lecture capture continue to increase, but even at places where they are peaking — public universities — the percentages are still in the single digits. Speaking of publics, more than half of those same universities are reporting a cut in their technology budgets for the third year in a row, according to the Campus Computing Project. The CCP also reports that Blackboard’s dominance has declined a bit — dropping from 57% to just over 50% — while one of the most interesting corresponding gains, if slight, is in the proportion of schools that have “no campus standard.”

Students are a little less than wowed with the technology they do see used in teaching. According to that aforementioned ECAR study, fewer than a third think the use they see is effective when it comes to clicker response systems, gaming devices, webcams, television (and recorded video), music devices, tablets, cameras, and smartphones. They seem to have the highest regard for WiFi, perhaps because they rely so much on their own devices, with nearly 90% of them having their own laptops, and pushing that particularly (a particularly powerful) device into the realm of near ubiquity.

Probably none of this is surprising, and it all seems to add up to the familiar two-steps-forward-and one-step-back shuffle. It ought to chasten, at least a little, those who talk abut academic technology in terms of campus tsunamis and restructured systems. There is no done deal, no silver bullet, no killer app. The next big thing is just another thing, and there are more of them all the time. Festina Lente (“make haste slowly”) is — or at least ought to be — our motto. We are a work in progress.