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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?"
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
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
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).