Slashdot Mirror
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.
There are very few comments at this time because Slashdot's database server died right after michael posted this story. When the db server dies, Slashdot switches to the static homepage that Anonymous Coward normally sees, which points to the static pages in /articles/... and all .pl files simply put up the static homepage. Under the old slashcode, you could tell this because "dead db static Slashdot" didn't have any banners. Now sometimes there's a line of text above the banner that pushes the banner down about 30 pixels.
Note: With the removal of the static archives of old Slashdot stories, you can no longer search Slashdot through Google.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Jesus, listen to the damn article before you post. He actually seems to know what he's talking about in the interview. He says the units will cost $500 or less each, and will contain a small amount of writable flash memory. They will function as thin clients when connected to the school's wireless network, and the sudents won't be allowed to load any programs on them. When they're at home, they'll dialup to access the network.
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...
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.
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 :-).