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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.
Man, this guy has guts. On the other hand, you could call him a PHB too. From an administrative perspective, there's soooo many problems that are going to crop up, they may totally take away any usefulness of this project.
And it's not just going to be the random "I can't open my lab report" type of problem. It's going to be the "I dropped my laptop on the way to school, and it fell apart" type of problem. All of the state.
I'd hate to be the support staff for any school district up in Maine...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
In the same vein, I saw this article yesterday about a school in NC that requires students to own a Palm IIIc and a portable keyboard. It certainly saves money to use PDA's instead of laptops, and I thought it was a neat idea.
www.code-fix.com
Laptops in school? Aren't there more efficient things to do with the money, like, paying teachers a bit more, maybe?
I may be wrong, and I kind of hope I am, but this SO sounds like a political trick to make it look like they do something for kids education, instead of REALLY tackling problems...
-- B.
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Will I retire or break 10K?
Point. Not to mention non-natives! I can more or less read and write in English, but listening to it is a wholly different matter. Bleh.
Hopefully some helpful person (or some determined karma whore
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
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."
At my school, and many others here in Melbourne Australia, the whole student populous has their own personal laptop. In general, there's not a huge benefit. The only class I use it for is Information Systems (for coding in Java - ugh), and occasionally Physics (recording results, drawing graphs).
;)
What can I say about compulsory student-laptop programmes in general? I don't see them as a good thing. I think an optional scheme would be much better, as there are plenty of people who hardly ever use their laptops, or have access to desktop computers at home that are perfectly suitable for what they need to do (write an essay, for example). On top of this many famalies cannot afford to shell out $2-3k for a decent laptop.
At my school they have a deal with a computer supplier which offers a 1 year parts, 3 year labour warranty, plus insurance, plus software at a not-too-unreasonable price. Twice a week or so they send out a technician to service the broken laptops, and we also have about three 'notebook service technicians' that look after staff and student problems. The system, in general, works pretty well.
They have several default install disk images that they stick on every laptop - this consists of Windows 98, drivers, Office 97, and a few curriculum-based software programmes. They don't really care if you install the OS of your choice (I personally run Slackware on mine), as long as you don't get up to any mischief. (In fact, they recently took down the MAC addresses of everyone's network cards due to some ARP spoofing that was going on - little do they realise I'm only an 'ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx:xx...' away from anonymity)
Many posters have commented on the breakability of laptops when put in this kind of environment. In the beginning this was a bit of a problem, but the Toshiba laptops that they reccommend generally serve us pretty well. I've had my 440cdx fall out of my locker a couple of times with the only damage being a cracked case. I'd estimate that, from a student body of 800 or so, only 20 LCDs would be replaced in one year. Not too bad, really.
In any case, it's good to see the Yanks are catching up to where we've been for the past 6 years
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...
My school did something like this. They got a deal with IBM to get a whole bunch of ThinPad 365EDs. The result was a complete disaster. Kids were playing catch with them, messing with the BIOS, ripping out huge portions of Windows and other unspeakable things.
Anyways, they have been sitting on a shelf in the library for a few years now. My dad is the auto teacher there and found them and asked if he could borrow them for my brother and I to use. We've had about 6 so far, two had physiclly wreaked hard drives, only one had the port covers still in place, two were missing _many_ drivers, on one someone had gone into the BIOS and disabled the cache, making it unbearably slow. One had Corel Suite 8 (the office app on these things) deleted and most had a few games and stuff installed. None had the PCMCIA modem that might have been there.
So basiclly of these 17,000 Laptops expect about 1,700 of them to be in perfect working order.
Off Topic Finish to my story: I currently have two working ones working: The one I'm writing this on, that I could just bearly get back working under Windows 95 and the other one was missing 3/4 of Windows 95 so I installed Linux on it. Then found out that Linux+X does not like a 486/100 with 12mb of memory as well as I have been told, so I dug out my 386's old copy of MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and installed it. I really wish I could morph them into a G4 Titanium PowerBook though...
America's school textbook system is a racket, and the textbooks suck, not so much because of the religious wars but because it's a damn racket, but the computers don't solve that. It doesn't matter if material is "current." Algebra hasn't changed since I was in school, nor physics, nor history. And you can bet the laptops will be used to look at pablum just as bad as in the textbooks because this does nothing to address the corruption of America's educational-industrial complex.
'nuff said.
1. What do you call a student who knows the
laptops better than the teachers? "Hacker."
Comes to mind. That and zero-tolerance should
make for some interesting war stories in the
letters section of the next 2600 issue.
2. Muggers, burglars, and other scalawags
and vagabonds will be making their way
to Maine some time soon. There is probably
good money to be had from robbing the students.
3. How much class time will be devoted to
waiting for everyone's software to boot up?
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.
Computers for kids, great idea. But now what are all the fearful and anxious adults going to do to control how those computers are used? What are they going to do about the kids who use their computers to trade music, games, and (gasp) porn?
The only thing worse than kids not having access to computers and the information and knowledge they unlock is for that access to be controlled or otherwise abridged, and yes that includes access to things that are sexually explicit. The world would be a much better place if our civilization didn't have this neurotic relationship with sex. Porn is harmless unless it is a person's sole or primary source of information about sex.
Porn is used as the universal excuse for denying access to information. That wouldn't be so bad if it were actually harmful to anyone. The fact that it isn't just makes the lies it is used to defend that much more bitter.
I'm 28 years old by the way.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You might know Clifford Stoll, he is famous from the early days of the Internet when he tracked down a computer spy. And he's programming computers since the mid 60s.
But his reasons for keeping computers out of the shools are compelling:
After I read the book, I was convinced, that we should have computers in school, but only where they are really useful. Giving a laptop to every pupil seems much too expensive and the money should better be spent for conventional education (more teachers, better books, better libraries).
Clifford Stoll sometimes sounds too extreme or even fanatic to me, but then he has a lot of facts which prove his ideas. So you might want to read his book or give it to your school :-).
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.
______________________________________
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I...
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On the off chance you don't have a soundcard, or are too lazy to listen to a 17 minute interview (of which, truth be told, only the first 10 min. or so cover the "laptops for 7th & 8th graders" program) here are some details. Note - these wouldn't be typical, off the shelf laptops - he's got a special 'new' beast in mind for the great state of Maine.
Gov. King is asking for "Smart Client" laptops - which as of today don't exist. They're putting out RFP soon to see what various companies are willing/able to build. So what is a Smart Client laptop? No hard disk. No floppy/CD. Programs are stored via a 'flash memory' system which will be upgradable from the network. An example he gives of what this would be capable of: students can take the computers home and type a paper with a flashed-down version of a word processor, then upload it once returning to school. He's hoping they can be bought en masse for about $500/machine. No word on what sort of applications/OS they'd be built on, but one can presume our good friends in Redmond will offer WinCE or some such beast.
I suppose you could think of it as being an X-client when at school, yet capable of functioning as a somewhat limited stand-alone machine if disconnected from the network.
Assuming it worked, this would eliminate support hassles (oops, I deleted gui32.dll . . . ) and rampant mp3/p0rn/warez/etc trading during 3rd period Social Studies. It might also make them slightly more rugged - although the LCD screen is still probably the most fragile part of the machine.
I live in Maine. I vote in Maine.
Local teachers and other school officials have been asked to *donate* old laptops (NOT thin clients, NOT PDAs, these are old 486-586ish laptops) to this program. There is _NOT_ money in the budget that has been allocated to buy the machines; there is money set aside for training teachers to reinstall windows 98 and the like.
Angus King is an otherwise excellent governor who is trying to end his second and last term as Governor with a whiz-bang techno-thing.
I wish that people would sometimes check into actual facts before writing them up for Wired and then perverting the facts once more for Slashdot.
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There is absolutely no question in my mind that 7th graders cannot handle laptops appropriately. I speak from disgusted personal experience here.
Over the last two years, my former high school changed dramatically, and what once was a fine, laid back academic environment I was happy in and excelled in, became much worse for the wear, IMNSHO. Junior year we received the curse of poorly implemented Block scheduling and the following year Apple iBooks were provided for every student in grades 9-12, along with AirPort wireless networking.
Now, the admin did not even think of the effect of instant messaging progs beforehand, and within a week we were rolling strong and chatting whenever we could basically. This caused stress between the students and teachers. Most teachers, of course, didn't really need the laptops for much at all. I recall a couple PowerPoint presentations, some web research in history class and obviously typing up papers. But what a fucking hassle. There were a myriad of rules constructed around everything which obliterated personal privacy, (and the right to encrypt my Word files) of course. The admin decided that, rather than laying out our rights, they would just sort of hold all the students in fear of being busted for online activities by etherpeek (a packet-sniffer prog) They quickly banned games and recreational use of the CD-ROM drive. Now, how the HELL are you supposed to enforce that? Additionally, without ANY kind of discussion (for there was little all year, except when I was getting chewed out in the principal's office) Napster was outright censored, and the administration maintained a shield of protective ambiguity about what they were monitoring. Speaking of privacy, one time the backup server's permissions got blown apart and everyone could quickly grab other people's files. And also there was the time when I discovered the functionality of packet sniffing over 802.11 wireless networks. That was interesting. I wanted to sort of alert the admins to it, but they were having such fun with kill-the-messenger tactics.
Simultaneously, dozens of kids (invariably boys) Got Busted for playing games. And a huge swath of the boys had pr0n on their computers. And about 15 screens got smashed.
Over the course of the year, I got very angry and depressed at the whole situation. (additionally at this school I was the only Linux/Free Speech/anti-DMCA person present) One day after we found out that an exchange student we all liked had secretly been zapped back to Belarus over break, we exploded with anger. I made a personal attack on the Assistant Principal and got suspended. When a friend reported what I said on HIS web site, he got suspended too.
Later that year we named out Physics balsa wood bridge "Suspension Bridge," which felt good.
This ridiculous project did little but waste time and money, add stress and make my senior year fucking suck. I apologize for the rant, and I take Paxil now, thankyouverymuch.
--hongpong.com
Now thousands more of our tax dollars per student are going to go toward technology that 99% of the teachers are completely unable to use in any effective way to teach them, and even more of the student's educational time will be spent not learning the basic skills necessary to get and hold a beginning job.
Hurry up and build a stardrive, NASA, so I can get the fuck off this rock.
BTW, it should be possible to run X on a 486/100; speed is even okay on my 486/66. It's the low-memory that makes it a bit of a challenge. But you should be able to run a lightweight window-manager like BlackBox. Just don't try to install KDE or Gnome!