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Laptops In Education
We'll start with the state of Maine, where the governor recently announced a program to provide portable computing devices to every public school student in Maine in seventh grade. The students would keep the devices after graduation. The specifications envision something that isn't a dumb terminal (thin client is the politically-correct name these days), yet isn't a full-fledged laptop either. They're looking to spend less than $500/device, and get something that runs all day without recharging, connects seamlessly via a wired or wireless LAN at schools or libraries, yet can dial-up from home, won't break when dropped, etc. Given my knowledge of the state of portable computing, their specifications look pretty optimistic for the dollars they want to spend.
A different approach is exemplified by a proposal before the New York City Board of Education, the largest educational district in the country. They plan to provide standard laptops at a discount to every student above the fourth grade. How to pay for the program? Simple: all students will be directed to and through a Web portal for all of their schoolwork, which will be loaded with kid-targeted advertising. Apparently representatives from IBM and Toshiba have been lobbying the school board for the last nine months to get this plan approved; a cynical observer would suggest that they plan to make a few bucks from the $billion or more that would be spent on this plan. What's the best way to keep deals like this from turning into boondoggles and pork-barrel projects? What's the best way to keep kids from being bombarded with Nike advertisements during algebra class?
Conventional wisdom is that commercial off-the-shelf equipment is the best deal. That may not be true in these situations. One commenter pointed out that a specially designed red-and-blue laptop adorned with a NYC logo or something similar would be the perfect theft protection -- since you couldn't sell it to anyone, it's not likely to be stolen.
Some companies are already angling for this market. The people at Netschools are selling a system complete with ruggedized, kidproof laptops. And their internet access is pre-censored; how nice. By press time, Netschools hadn't responded to me with cost information about their systems, but my guess is: not cheap. Not cheap at all.
So Slashdot the Forum is open. Are laptops useful in education? People have looked at this question before, it's even been discussed on Slashdot before, but the jury still seems to be out. What's needed, a proprietary device that downloads homework or a real laptop that can do anything? How much money should be spent? What sort of device can you get for X amount of money? How can you get a device cheap enough for everyone to have one but rugged enough that it doesn't break the first time you drop it? Schools, naturally, want completely closed devices which students can't alter in any way; subversive folks like me and Lord Finkle-McGraw would probably prefer devices which students can alter - and which the more creative, hackerish ones will. How can you avoid the situation presented in Right to Read, where the students don't have the root password to their computers?
"You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department -- the very best -- had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?"
"Clearly."
"This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr. Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that? Or are they like the schools that Wordsworth complained of?"
I know if I were a parent I'd refuse to let my kids use a comptuer that is advertising. I refuse to allow a TV in my house because I cannot stand the mindless stream of sex and violence. Kids see some of that, and as a parent I have the right to censor what my kids see. (Note that this is my kids, you can allow your kids to see porn if you want)
Case in point: At a friends the other day, and he had the tv on. He called me over to see a comercial on tv. They showed a lady in her underware. To me that is porn, and I would not accept that in my home. To others that is normal. The point is I don't trust advertisers.
Now I'll agree that I cannot get away from advertisments. Nor can I shelter my kids from all kinds of what I consider over the line that others would not. That is not the point though.
Then we get into the issue of target. Advertisments are ment to get you to spend money. Kids do not have the judgements of adults (though some adults have poor judgemetn and some kids do well) Keep your spend money propaganda out of my kids mind! (Keep it out of mine too for that matter) When you require me to go through a portal you are forcing it on me. Let me at least choose the portal - ideall one with a privacy policy that I can agree with.
Please do not respond to the values of the above. I know many /. readers disagree. While my leanings are in the direction of this post I intentially went much farther then my beliefs to make a point: parents have the right to make choices for their kids.
Both my parents are teachers, my mother teaches year 2. Our family system is runs Windows, and I end up explaining what seem to me to be fundamental things over and over. I suspect I'd be a bad teacher, because I get very frustrated over my mothers inability to grasp what I feel to be obvious (it probably isn't to many people, but it is to me), and her preference to get me to work things out rather than mess with the system to work it out. Her instinctive belief is that I understand computers, therefor I know every application every written inside out. I don't know Microsoft publisher, and I have no intention of wasting time learning it.
I believe my mother is a good teacher. I don't believe my mother would be a good computer teacher, and I don't think she'd think that either. And I think many teachers would be the same. Before a lot of money is invested in these systems, what kind of checks will be done to make sure that they'll ever even be used?
Of course, as an Australian taxpayer, what American taxes are spent on isn't really one of my concerns :)
Colin Scott
Colin Scott If you build it, they will be dumb...
The title says it all. Born and raised in Maine, I took certain interest when I read about it in my campus newspaper. Wow. Gov. King wants to give all the kids laptops. That's a lot of money. Yeah, we've got a huge surplus here in Maine this year. And Gov. King wants to make sure he goes down in infamy. But I don't think it'll work. The plan the state legislature has proposed has half the funds coming from the buget surplus, and half coming from the educational department. Good idea, unless you've visited one of Maine's many, many delapidated schools. Sure, we've all seen the news specials on the inner-city New York schools which have no heat, leaky roofs, small classrooms, etc. Now, put that school hundreds of miles from a city of any sort. Share that school between a half dozen townships and villages. Make some kids ride on a bus for an hour to get there. Now put them in a broom closet for their day's education.
Not my idea of a good time.
I was lucky, I grew up in Bangor, a bustling metropolis of 33,000 (The 3rd largest city in the state...please don't laugh) My school was one of the largest in the state, about 1400 people by the time I graduated. But the building was designed only to hold about 1000. What happened? They converted some of the labs into classrooms. Electical lab? Buh-bye. Woodshop? Now a lecture hall. It's not that the classes weren't being used, it's that they found "better" uses for them. Study halls had a higher priority then learning the difference beween ohms and hertz. But I had it good as far as most of the state goes.
Gov. King should be thinking about spending the money to improve the standard of Education of Maine. Repair some of these run-down schools. Give some low-interest loans to school districts to build new buildings. Give the teachers of the state a frickin' raise. We have some of the lowest-paid educators in the country. Ooh, now let's give them the extra burden of having to teach with laptops now, too. Maybe buy some books for the students...$500/student could go a long way as far as books could go. I remember using a book printed in 1979 as my US History book in 7th grade...Well, it missed everything in MY lifetime.
Gov. King's plan is quite lofty, and it sure has put him on the map as far as news goes. Ooh, look at the great Independent Govenor of Maine. Look at his great plans.
One thing his plan DOESN'T cover is the extra training the teachers will have to recieve in order to effectively use these computers to actually teach. Otherwise, I think King is setting himself up for a very expensive free round of solitaire machines to buy for all the 7th graders of Maine.
Oh well. Maybe I'm just bitter that I didn't get a laptop as a 7th grader...
Bonz..
"A crust of bread is better than nothing. Nothing is better than love. Therefore, by the transitive property, a crust
1) Laptops are technology and as we all know, technology solves all problems
2) Its spending money and as we all know, spending money solves all problems
Say, I've got a wacky idea! Why don't we pay teachers good salaries? Why don't we invest some of that money set aside for the laptops into funding teachers who know how to make use of them.
Technology is an ethically and practically neutral thing. You can use it for good or bad. You can use it to be productive or waste time. You can use it to learn or you can use it to play Quake in class. Just simply dumping into a classroom without taking the effort to train teachers to use this stuff (and perhaps make it financially rewarding even) then this is all money flushed down the gaping toilet of rapid obsolescense!
I'll be really amused (in a grim depressed kind of way) when a few years down the road, the economy is in the toilet, the schools are out of neat-o computers, and the schools are still in the same sad shape they are now.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I see some reason is supplying kids with free/cheap/subsidized computers -- desktops which they'll have at home. I don't see much use in giving them laptops to be used in class. The problem is that effectively using laptops in class is very complicated. Not only you need networking infrastructure, both hardware and software (and no, 'wall' doesn't cut it), but you also need teachers who understand all this. And most of all, you need a teaching methodology that makes use of all that computing power. To date I haven't heard of a single successful project (but some unsuccessful ones) which intergrated laptops into classroom teaching. Computers are good for doing homework, but not for the classroom, at least not yet.
I have no objection to giving technology to kids -- I am sure they'll discover many uses of it (like playing network games during class and making the teacher's computer crash). It's a good thing and will feed their brains. However, the resources of our educational system are quite limited and I am afraid that this is going to end up being a very expensive white elefant. I am sure 95% of teachers won't know how to use it, or have any clue what to do with it.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The intellectual model being public schooling is broken. It's presumption is that you can take ALL the children born within one year of each other in a given geographic region, and teach them the same subject at the same time at the same rate.
Won't work. Can't work. Why bother tweaking it with computers? No amount of patching can remove the bugs from badly designed code. No amount of tweaking (or school reform) can fix our system of public education. Our nation's children would be better off if we closed the schools tomorrow.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
And how did it work?
Within the first two months, over 30% of the kids' laptops had to be sent back to the manufacturer to be put back together because kids would drop them, pick them up and carry them across the room by the LCD, etc.
About a month after that, we had to quarantine the 6th graders from the network for a few weeks because in their warez-crazy fervor they had succeeded in turning our school's network into a hotspot for just about every trojan horse and computer virus known to the computer industry.
For the first semester, we learned nothing in class because the teachers didn't know how to use their computers and each period would begin with yet another session of me or one of the other computer geeks searching the teacher's computer's hard drive for the class notes or explaining that Microsoft Internet Explorer is not an operating system and Yahoo is not a web browser.
After they finally got the hang of the power switch, they went nuts trying to do everything in class. Which only wasted more time. Why? Nobody bothered to teach the teachers how to touch type.
In the second semester, the teachers gave up on the computers. Now, all through the day, we would go to class with $60,000 worth of electronics that was better put to use by leaving it all on the floor rather than having it get in the way of school.
So what DID I gain out of all of this? I didn't have to pay attention in my boring biology class because I could spend the time installing Slackware on my laptop and toying with programming plasmas and such. I learned to program and use linux (see above.) I socialized much thanks to the goodness of being in front of a $2,000 dedicated ICQ workstation all day.
It's been shown in studies (which I cannot quote because I can't remember their names - I'm posting this from a computer-assisted class right now so I don't have the time to search for them) that computers generally only help class if that class happens to be a computer science class. My high school's "computers in the classroom" program nearly sabotaged my education; I only saved it by choosing to learn in spite of class. I think that schools need to realize there is a reason why the biggest rhetoric spouters on this laptops in school are Microsoft, Toshiba, and IBM rather than, say, anybody who knows jack about education.
I think the idea of every kid having there only laptop is great - I know I would have loved one and learnt a lot from one when I was a kid - but I dont think having a laptop for every child should be getting the kind of attention it seems to be getting...
Basic computer skills are good for any kid to have and the analytical skills built through programming are also very valuable but before you can develop any of these skills you need a good grounding in the basics - basic mathematics/literacy and so on... I think every kid having a computer will add to the basic learning process or distract from it - flashy graphics might help kids learn certain things more easily but by that reasoning CNN should be a much better news resource then any static web page, and we all know thats not true, dont we?
StormChaser
Seems to me that the basic problem is this: People have come to look upon the computer (in any of its forms) as a panacea for all the ills suffered by the educational system. "This technology is great! Let's get it to the kids!" Very few people seem to have given any forethought to *what* kids will be using computers for, though. As stated countless times, a computer is a tool. Just as a screwdriver is useless if you don't understand how a screw works, a computer is useless if you don't know basic grammar or arithmetic.
I see no reason at all for kids that aren't yet in high school to have computers. People must first learn basics, and then learn how to learn, before being presented with fancy tools to get the job done. Imagine learning calculus before algebra.
Unix: Where
Ask any educators (and I've asked several) what, precisely, having a computer will accomplish for primary school students.
They don't know.
They just know that technology is hot, and so they want to look proactive by getting "computers" into the hands of kids.
Certain basic skills need to be learned before a student can even use a computer; a child who can't read won't gain from having a computer.
And what about people like my wife, who can't coexist with machines? She's a brilliant lady with a Master's degree in Geography, but computers and technology simply go bad in her presence. Don't write such off to inexperience or ineptitude; some people simply aren't "machine compatible."
Schools have been buying computers for years -- a time when educational quality has declined substantially. See, it's easy to slap some computers into the classroom; it is, however, *very* hard to deal with real problems, like hostile school environments, broken homes, and a society filled with commercials and irresponsible images.
That's just what these kids need: More advertising, to aid in their development as little consumer cogs. It started with the Coke machines in the hall and billboards on school buses. I'm waiting for for school stores to start "giving away" Coke & Nike t-shirts and bumper stickers...
Most (but not all) school administrators don't want to think, they just "want to do what's best for the kids." Of course, they haven't defined "best", and you can't really blame school officials for being part of a society that prefers greed and banal entertainment over constructive consideration.
In a way, this goes back to Jon Katz's concerns about surveillance and security in schools. Rather than address the serious social problems in our society, the schools (and people in general) would rather take the easy road of spying and blaming.
I don't object to computers in the classroom, per se -- I simply want schools to address more important issues first.
We have a Physics teacher (who I respect a great deal) who flat-out refused to have anything to do with the program, turning over his allocation of 5-7 machines to someone else. Why? Here goes:
- The machines came with Windows 98 installed, as well as DOS-based add-on "security" software that essentially renders the Windows shell useless. You can't even write files to the hard drive, for God's sake.
- The internet connection is provided through what must be a shared dial-up line on some big quad-Xeon box in the office. I've seen faster 14.4K dial-up lines.
- Students and teachers are forced to sign a "terms of service" agreement to use the computers, including a clause that holds a person who finds a security hole responsible. The terms warn to "not look for security flaws". You don't have to look: they're everywhere.
- Along with the computers came a print network of about 25 printers. The last time any of them worked was three weeks ago. They have never all worked at the same time.
- Not one shred of educational (calculus, physics, math, history) software has been allowed on any of the machines. To install any software, apply to the board, wait 6-8 weeks.
What's really ironic is that on the same day that the machines were brought in, I counted three major roof leaks in our building, some of which soaked students as they were eating lunch. I've had bad experiences with "technology in the (secondary) schools", but it could work - if teachers had some say in the application of the technology. Our physics stuff could be modeled easily on a Linux-based 386: assuming we and the teachers had control of it.43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
The best thing to do is probably for them to have sub $200 web pads that allows the students to save their notes and homework and stuff like that on the Internet somewhere (say if a storage service provider get a contract with an education system, etc.). I think if you are spending more money than that, it's too much.
It's either cheap portable computing appliances (not general-purpose devices like regular PCs) or ubiquitous computing, where the students can have access from almost anywhere. Of course, the trend right now looks like portable (wireless, mobile) is more popular, but maybe in a few years, it will swing back the other way again.
I think that for them to consider it at all, it's gotta be as cheap if not cheaper than the game consoles. Or at least that's the way I believe it should be (not necessarily the way I think it will be though).