After my interview with Burns, she gave me an archive of her reports and articles spanning from 1977 to 1998. Reading through them, I uncovered a presentation she gave at the American Council on Education in Washington D.C., on October 16, 1981, titled “Technology is Not Enough”. For a presentation in 1981, the title still holds certain relevance. I discovered what might have been the guiding principles of the earliest days of the ITP program. She laid out two points in working with technology: 1) “consider the technology as a tool which, in itself, could do nothing,” and 2) “treat the technology as something that everyone on the team could learn, understand, and explore freely.” This was a similar formula she had developed in her research projects with the AMC and she has iterated and relied on it ever since. (via Rhizome | Technology is Not Enough: The Story of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program)
