Imagine a paperless world (and all the saved trees)!

Will Richardson is noticing an addiction to paper and he looks at himself:

Now I don't know that I've ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still read lots of paper books, but I'm working on that.)

Yet just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room, paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards...it's everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, "paper trained," and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.

Me, too, to a great extent.

But how close we are to a paperless society, really?

Remember my question about the 'paperless house'?

Speaking of educational settings, we went to a parent-teacher conference last night and, when there was a question of how to coordinate some information among a larg-ish number of people - the first suggestion (immediatelly agreed on by all in the room) was, of course, a Google Doc. What else?

There's hope.