Massachusetts Universities To Require Laptops

karmma writes: "The Boston Globe has published this article that says that Massachusetts will become one of the first states to require the purchase and use of laptop computers. While several private universities have already adopted this practice, this program will be among the first at publicly funding such a program. Full and partial vouchers will be provided to low income students, and educational programs and infrastructure will be established." Actually, Northern Michigan University, a public university in Marquette, Mich., started doing this with laptops a couple of years back. Having spent some time there, it's pretty cool how it works -- it means a lot more integration of electronic material in the classroom, from what I saw.

Comments

What a great way for Universities to save money...

[weave]

This is a decision only a non-imformed administrative council could love. I'm sure the pitch was something along the lines of: We can stop buying computers for labs since every student will have their own computer. We won't have to buy expensive servers to store student files since they will have their own storage. We won't have to back up their data since they will be responsible for their own data.

This seems to me like a giant step backwards. The idea of physically carting around your data in a bulky laptop from dorm to class to lab is ridiculous... Data like this should be accessible from anywhere from any machine as long as the correct security credentials are supplied...

This also means that all students will have to purchase licenses for each software package they ever want to learn. What if I want to go to a lab and try my hand at AutoCAD 2000? In a typical university, just go to the CAD lab and try it out. Now you'd have to go out and buy a copy for your own laptop.

The support logistics also seem like a nightmare. For example, where will a student turn when they attempt to install a parallel-port zip drive to their laptop and it blue-screens during the next boot, making all of their data inaccessible? (We had a real problem where I work with that. For some reason, external parallel-port zip drives and NT 4 just don't get along very well... Loads of BSOD problems after a reboot after an install. We finally had to ban the things...)

I don't think I'd like this.

[Apuleius]

Recall the time limited textbook issue?

Seriously, if I were an undergrad again, (Lord have mercy), I would not like being required to obtain two grand's worth of easily stolen gear when there are other, better ways to use comptuer technology in education.

Not every topic requires computing, let alone mobile computing, shakedowns like this open the path for time limited textbooks, and desk top computers are not as easily stolen.

Blind technophilia is not leading edge.

This might not be a good thing

[wowbagger]

This might not be a good thing, IFF the students stop thinking and just become LIDs (Living Input Devices).

A case study: when I was in undergraduate engineering school (1983-1987), many if not most of the students had HP-CV calculators with the engineering formula add-on pack. I had a TI-35. During one test in Circuits II, I dropped my calculator, and the keyboard came apart, scattering the keys over the floor. I re-assembled my calculator, and still managed to complete the test before anybody else in the class (and get one of the highest scores on the test.)

Why was I able to complete the test? Because I had the good fortune to have had a high school teacher who beat it into my brain to solve the equations first, then crunch the numbers. Most of my classmates just started plugging the numbers into the equations, then taking the resulting numbers and plugging them into the next set of equations, et cetera.

By actually doing the algebra, I was able to reduce out all the pi's, root-2's, and so forth, and come up with simple equations that were far more accurate than the results of the other students. And since I had to type far fewer numbers into my calculator, I was far faster than they were. Finally, since I actually saw what happened in the circuit ("Ah! so that resistor doesn't effect the output voltage, because I just cancelled it out of the equation!"), I had a deeper understanding of the theory.

My point is, that while a computer is a great tool for many things (I shan't tell you about taking my Atari 800 and monitor into my Linear algebra class to run my Gaussian Elimination program on the final....) it must not become a substitute for thinking. I fear that the students in this school won't learn to do algebra (rather they will just use Mathcad student's edition), won't learn to spel korrecktly, and not will grammer learn ("It looks like you are writing a term paper. Would you like to cut and paste some text from Encarta?").