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Laptops in Every Backpack
Scott Sawyer writes: "Check out Wired to see that Maine is going to put a laptop in every 7th graders school bag. I remember when we had to go to another room to work on the Tandy, TRS-80's." We did a story about Laptops in Education a few months ago that had more information about this Maine proposal that's now a reality.
when i was in middle school my backpack was heavy enough! now they want these kids to carry around an extra 8-12 lb?!
we have to be serious here, would you intrust your 12 your old child with a $3000 wizbang lastest greatest laptop that only weighs 4 pounds or will you give him/her you 3 year old notebook that weighs almost as much as your child?
i'd drop down to a $1300 laptop and most of those also weigh 8 lb! the exception to that rule is the Apple iBook and with one of those suckers then weight starts to become a non-issue, but at 5 lb it is still probably to much.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I'm shocked by the negativity here. You people are supposed to geeks. You're supposed to be the people that are most aware of the fact that by the next generation, computery literacy will rank in importance right up there with literacy itself. The people that know that very soon, it will be incredibly difficult to get any job beyond manual labor if you don't know how to use a computer. It's absolutely shameful that all of the kids I went to school with in high school just last year were wasting their time in two elective classes a day (80 minutes each) and going home to a home without a computer, when knowledge of how to use a computer is becoming one of the most important skills for getting a good job in America. Forget tech support, costs, and other understandably important things. At the very least, a Hell of a lot more of these kids won't be absolutely lost when they sit down at a computer. Better yet, quite a few of these kids that are currently computer illiterate are untapped geeks... a lot of computer illiterate kids could be given their calling in life and the hope of a good, high-paying job through these laptops. I expected more intelligence from the people here. This is one of the few examples of a politician really understanding the importance of computers, and you people are just throwing your usual pessimistic crap at him. This guy now has my respect, and he would have my vote if I were in his state.
Since sex ed classes are too controversial, they'll just let the kids trade cyberporn to learn about the human body.
What you fail to realize, is that even if the laptops in question are crappy, obsolete Dell or Gateway junk, they are still COMPUTERS. They can be NETWORKED. Their contents can be UPDATED.
Think about it for a moment. Instead of working from obsolete, dumbed-down hard copy textbooks that have been eviscerated to satisfy the bible-thumpers in texas, kids can work from current material, obtained on line and edited or written by their teacher, or by community volunteers, etc.
School districts will be able to get courses from the net that fit their own ideas of what to teach, not the insipid pablum that the textbook companies have to write.
If you're offended by the idea of those kids working with windoze, then roll up your sleeves, and start putting together a Linux-based courseware package.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's the ultimate "dog bites man" story. Let's see: Americans are insanely mobile, and yet the country has no national curriculum, so children who move have gaps in what they've learned. Any attempts to write even a skeleton for a national curriculum gets shot down by politics. By the time kids enter kindergarten, they have been driven by television to have the attention span of a horny weasel, making discipline difficult, ever more so because every class will have two or more problem kids who cannot be disciplined without a confrontation with their parents. Another two or more will have been so neglected that the teacher will have to show them how to tie their shoes, use silverware, and sometimes how to brush their teeth. Separating problem children for the benefit of normal kids is too tied up in legalities, so it just doesn't happen. Wellcome to the circus. But hold, there's more.
Teaching doesn't pay well. So few people enter it. Many of these come from the bottom of the collegiate barrel. Ed-school is a joke. Teacher unions worsen the problem by fighting against any attempt to tighten merit requirements in the hiring, tenuring, promotion, or firing of teachers. The only surefire way to fire a teacher is to lay an accusation of pedophilia. In ed-school, teachers learn methods based on the ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his heirs, which is largely counterproductive. Ironically, ed-schools continue to represent Rousseau's ideas as grand innovation. So the classroom is a lunatic asylum, and the teachers can often be counted among the patients.
First grade reading is hardest hit by ed-school methods, making for a piss-poor start. The impact of "whole-language" teaching has a negative effect on the entire 12 year system. Yet ed-schools stick to these methods because ed-schools are a cult, not a branch of academia. As students progress through the system, they are hit by popular culture and its pernicious influence against making any effort longer than thirty minutes. This same monstrosity also helps create the school clique system, which by high school comes to resemble wartime Beirut, minus the firearms.
And the solution, says the state of Maine, is to give them all laptops. And people wonder why I am renewing my green card, but not filing for naturalization...
'nuff said.
A lot of people are being left behind in the computer age because they are old and thus find it hard to learn an entire new vocabulary for dealing with computers. But that is not the problem kids have. Age 18 is not too old to catch this wave. Kids have other disadvantages in need of redress: if they can't write clearly, they come off as idiots in email. If they can't read, they're toast. If they don't have a good base of general knowledge and a good grasp on highbrow (i.e. technical or literate) English, they're toast. Laptops don't solve any of these problems, which means laptops don't close the real digital divide.
Many teachers and school people in general are techno-phobic anal-retentive control freaks. (Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but those are usually good teachers who are still stuck with their hands tied due to a control-freak principal.) They will often have the insane urge to regulate everything, to the extent that some poor kid gets yelled at for changing the background.
If the usage of laptops is at all regulated by the school, it won't help to acheive their computer literacy goals, because the students won't be allowed to experiment and learn and will be held down to the (generally low) level of computer literacy of the adults feeling the need to regulate them.
Forget anything about kids changing the operating system on their computer, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to install any new software. Can you imagine some bright seventh grader getting in trouble for installing a C compiler (or even Visual Basic)? I have not yet met a computer literate child who learned what they know under the paranoid control of the teachers. To really learn, they'd need to experiment, and I don't think there's much chance of a school allowing that.
To improve computer literacy, computers need to go to kids outside of the control of the school. Perhaps it is possible to teach them to act like a monkey pushing buttons (make a word document), but for them to actually learn anything they need to experiment and play. Due to the authoritarian nature of schools, the only place for this is outside of school.
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