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How PDAs Intersect With School
An Anonymous Coward writes: "It's never too young to be a yuppie. An engineering professor at the University of Michigan is studying how handheld technology can be incorporated in elementary and high schools. His theory is that PDAs can provide students with a much more interactive and cheaper means of learning than desktop computers. The professor has created a number of interesting applications for using PDAs in school, including a 'cooties' simulator, where students beam around a virus from Palm to Palm and then figure out how it propagated. The New York Times covers the use of PDAs in classrooms here, and Wired News has an article here talking about schools who ban students from carrying PDAs." Both articles focus on Palm OS devices at a school in Ann Arbor, but only the Wired piece points out that the devices were banned there last year.
Ann Arbor Open's policy isn't unique: Several schools around the country are banning handheld devices.
Damn. Busted for carrying an automatic pencil.
Schools really are getting out of hand.
I think that would be a much better question. The reality seems to be that we have a totally disfunctional group running the educational system with little or no effort made to coordinate the various levels together to provide a comprehensive education.
1. Interactive (but not-computer) devices being banned from preschool/Kindergarden/grade school children.
2. Middleschool/Highschools banning HP-type calculators and handheld-type devices.
3. Universities that claim to be intellectual bastions of free-thinking; but then go out of their way to lock students into proprietary and expensive software.
Wasn't the whole promise of the "Information Age" and the digital revolution to begin the process of seeding ideas *before* the kids get set in their ways? It's only when the inventions of the previous generation become the *standards* for the next generation that real breakthrough bubble up.
Refusing to integrate these potentially educationally-rich technologies is a huge failure.
It seems that it's these supposed "educators" who need to learn a thing or two.