We have been listening to this for almost a decade that the world will go Paperless very soon but it hasn’t happened so far. I don’t see it happening in the next couple of years even. It is probably not because of technology and has nothing to do with the maturity of technology compared to the maturity of the paper but rather I see it as more of something related to our psychologies. Most of the debates that we listen to for most of the time are stressing upon the need of Paperless environments at work, education, home, etc but in almost half of those debates, people use the conventional notepads to record major happenings.

That is where my perspective coincides from theirs. If everyone is having this feeling that we all need to move to a paperless environment both for the security and easy access of valuable information, why aren’t they letting go of the paper then? What I understand on most of the occasions is; a lot of those who are actually creating standards are still from the 70s or 80s. Most important of people who could make a difference are educationists who are the ones setting up trends in the world. Their minds are still struck in the world where we had huge bundles of papers and perhaps paper was the most easy and accessible way to store information.

While we stand here in the start of 2013, things have transformed a whole lot over the time and Google, Bing, Yahoo Search, etc have replaced the need of catalogues that used to be in the libraries for your easy access to information while writing a research papers. I assume that a lot of people will come up with questions about the credibility of information that these search engines come up with but with the continuing evolution of the search engines and their algorithms and the Semantic Web movement by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the web is transforming into a great place itself.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has comprehensively defined Semantic Web as a resource that “provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application enterprise and community boundaries”. Semantic Web movement is followed by another great initiative by mainly the major knowledge providers online by the name of “Semantic Search”. Semantic Search basically aims to improve the accuracy of searches made in a system, in our case online, by actually understanding the intention behind the search being made and grabbing results by understanding the contextual meanings of the terms used.

Can we go paperless in Education? Yes we can. By all means we can. People who are debating on the downsize of using Technology all over the educating experience might still think that technology is not mature enough for a complete transition but simple cloud experience can make this move a lot easier to adapt as well as implement. And according to my perspective, this complete move of getting the world into a Paperless environment would not only help the academia but it would also make access of information easily available to people sitting across oceans who are deprived of education just because they don’t have enough resources to pay for education.

You might ask me a question as to why am I focussing primarily on Education System and not others. The point of doing this is because with the arrival of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle Enterprise Manager, etc. most other systems have made the transition already since I assume they understood the importance of saving resources for making a better future within or outside of their system. It is the Academia that is mostly devoid of Technology Aided Learning. Automated College Management Systems are not adequate to prove your adaptability to technology.

Go completely paperless, Screenr and Screencast can help you record presentations; YouTube and Vimeo are a great place for saving your recorded lectures; Assignment and Projects can be delivered through a lot of shared Cloud Storage services that includes and is not limited to Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, etc; lastly, you want a medium to assess your students for what you’ve taught, you can find a great Test/Assessment module already made and this might help you generate your Test Papers that can be accessed by anywhere in the world therefore making your educating experience and student learning experience, as exciting as it actually should be.

I have just touched one aspect of it. There are many that are hindering the move that should have happened years ago. We’re still bound by boundaries where printed material is sticking around us and is creating a barrier between intellectual interactions between borders. A real paperless world is the real boundary less world that we’re all talking about.