Slashdot Mirror
How Laptops in Education Can Help Dictators, Hurt Learning
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on worries that the OLPC's BitFrost security protocols could hand a ready-made surveillance system to controlling 3rd world governments. The laptops identify themselves regularly to a server that can disable individual machines reported stolen — a system that hands a government a kill switch for every unit. BitFrost also has the potential to have machines attach a unique ID to every internet transaction, helping out anyone wanting to track net internet use. A freely available paper from a recent USENIX conference spells out the concerns."
Relatedly, an anonymous reader points out a story at Slate about a study which examined the impact that free PCs had on poor students in Romania, writing that "giving the kids machines without a corresponding level of parental supervision just resulted in distractions which ultimately damaged academic performance. By contrast, allowing children access to machines in a supervised setting, say an after school program via school labs, might mitigate some of the negative effects."
Dictators use whatever means at their disposal to control their people.
Details at 11.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
3rd-world dictators? Shyeah. Try "all governments everywhere."
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Anyone give this a read? A way to fight back... maybe?
Thought of posting this a few weeks ago re: the tracker tags a Texas school was using, but missed out on a near-top post.
Read it...
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
True, this all is quite a problem, but for every problem, there's a solution. For every surveillance method, there's some talented kid out there figuring a way to circumvent it.
One of the geekier recipients of these laptops will engineer a way around this BS...and then he'll share that info with his less-geeky friends. The government will have considerably less control than it thinks it does.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The Internet is like New York City. You can find anything you want there. From great art and science to the worst filth.
The same basic rule should apply. Don't let your kids run around unattended.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Such a shady system doesn't exist to help prevent theft of $3,000 laptops, and you're going to put a system in place to protect $100 laptops that are given out for free?
What a scam, and a shame, this is.
I've very rarely seen computers useful in courses where the coursework isn't actually computer-related. Programming, digital audio, typing, etc. are all places where computers belong. Anywhere else, I've found them counterproductive to learning. The distraction factor, plus the amount of time spent getting everything to work properly, not to mention having a machine doing something for you that you might otherwise learn to do yourself, make it a waste. This includes calculators in math classes, except when the class has algorithmic concepts that must be simulated.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
It reminds me of well off people stressing over giving a pan handler a dollar.. how exactly will that dollar be used ? alchohol ?, lottery tickets ?. ciggarettes ? ... If it's going to stress you out so much then just don't give anything.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Back in my high school days (80s), we had limited access to the computers (the PETs were in the computer room which was usually open for lunch for free time),
When I was not in front of the keyboard I was reading about computers in magazines or planning what I wanted to do next with the computer, I wrote so much code and other ideas on notebook paper helped get my pre-planning skills developed.
I am not sure full 24/7 access is better or not for kids to appreciate computers. But I can think it can be a major distraction if it is connected to the net all the time (and not just for the nasty stuff).
Limiting network access would be a good thing. then they can think and plan on what to do while connected. And/or work on stuff while not connected without the distraction of all that stuff on-line.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
A group of users have decided to try to implement Paranoid Linux as described in the book. It's a Linux distribution meant for use under oppressive regimes. It assumes you are under surveillance and actively attempts to veil your communications by hiding it among automatically generated random activity. Reminds me of the scheme Randy uses in Cryptonomicon to avoid eavesdropping on his laptop while trapped in his cell.
They appear to be in the very early stages only, but an interesting and potentially very worthy project.
paranoidlinux.org
You are talking about a 3rd world country who may not have been brought up on the amount of technology as many people in the west have been brought up on. You think parents of kids today are clueless of internet dangers. Think about the people in some 3rd world countries. So think of it like this, someone gives a poor person 100 million dollars but says you have to not touch the money and pay attention to a boring class all day. I think you would tell the teacher to F off and you would take your 100 million dollars. That is what it is like to these kids. They have probably never had a piece of technology of their very own (besides a radio or something similar). So yes a computer in the hands of an uneducated student with parents who do not know what their kids are getting into online or in the classroom will not help kids in these countries.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
When I was a kid, computers in schools meant punch cards at universities. By the time I was a teenager, it was an Apple II in the math lab and the only people interested were the real computer nerds. I was reading about things like PLATO and computer languages designed for teaching... languages better than Basic... but they were out of reach. I figured my kids would benefit.
Then the personal computer revolution hit its peak and we got an Atari and Logo and all that good stuff, and then my kids were born, but by the time they were old enough to be really interested in computers and what Daddy was doing what they mostly had in school were IBM PCs that were running Office and used to teach kids how to be secretaries and accountants.
Computers in schools seem to miss the point more often than not.
You must have missed the part that said essentially none of the big brother security stuff was enabled on the laptops shipped with the G1G1 program. The only thing still there is the presence of a BIOS lock requiring a developer key (which you can easily get) to flash the firmware with your own image.
I understand, and agree, with your characterization of computers as assistive technology for children with disabilities. My mother worked as a speech pathologist in a public school system, and I got to see some of the technology she was using with some of the disabled children she worked with, and it was really amazing to see how much of an improvement the technology made in the education of these kids.
My question, however, is this: have there been any studies or research done on the educational outcomes for average children (i.e., without disabilities), to show that giving them a laptop somehow enhances their education? If so, do you have any references to them? I've had no success in finding anything that really answers the question for me.
I'm hard-pressed to believe that handing kids laptops is somehow a panacea that will ensure they all get great educations, because it seems to me like saying handing someone a paintbrush will allow them to paint like Rembrandt. I think for the "geeky" kids, who are inclined to like technology, math, science, etc., having ready access to a computer could be a wondrous thing. But I would think for the other kids, it'd be just another distraction, and I've yet to see this question addressed fully in any discussion of the OLPC (and similar) program(s).
What's worse is that with an electronic device like a laptop or a "Kindle like" device, information can be easily "updated" to read however the current power structure wants it to.
Is anyone else nervous that Rupert Murdoch's Corp has taken an interest in electronic textbooks?
When history gets in the way of some future political power they can simply "update" that e-book or laptop and then it will read as they want it to.
At least when you printed a book it stayed that way...now information is malleable it's going to become untrustworthy.
Forced "updates" for "security reasons" and no trustworthy source of information.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
First of all, I am a CS bachelor from Romania, and I'd like to state some facts about the study that's referenced here:
1) The Euro 200 program was just a PR stunt of our goverment to get more votes, it was never ment as an educational program.
2) This program consisted just in giving a 200 euro reduction to children from relatively poor households if they bought a computer. It was never associated with an educational program, or any educational software(as in programs, ebooks, or anything at all).
3) The children who benifited from this program being mainly poor children, so even if they wanted to learn something, most of them didn't have the money to buy software, or to pay for an internet connection.
Adding to this most of the computers you could buy in Romania would come readily installed with a pirated version of Windows and full of pirated games and other pirate booty.
So let me explain it clearly:
The study is absolute *insert word here* because:
Even if those kids wanted to do something else but play pirated games on a pirated version of windows, they couldn't have done it, they didn't have any learning material or an internet connection.
On top of which there was no educational program that would allow the schools to help the children use the computers for educational purposes.
(OK, in order to avoid comments, there was and is a computerized educational program in Romania called AEL [advanced e-learning or something like that], which consists in a crappy CMS that's practically unusable, and has such a restrictive licence that you're not even allowed to look at it, not to speak of taking it home, at least this was the case 3 years ago)
The Euro200 program is totally oposed to the OLPC initiative wich consists in giving children small low-performance linux laptops(at least that was the idea not to long ago) full with educational software and an educational program that makes full use of those notebooks as an educational tool.
The idea is not in giving children computers, it's in giving them the oportunity to use them as educational tools.
If you give kids a relatively powerfull desktop with windows and full of games do you really expect them to study all day or to play games all day.
On The other hand, if you give them low-performance laptops, full with educational software and help them and require them to use these laptops for educational purposes, then you really can expect results.
- Government gives out laptops to schoolchildren
- Laptops can be 'controlled' by government
- fear that bad behaviour (in the eyes of the government) will result in laptops being disabled, and schoolchildren punished.
Wow. Sounds a little like Maine's http://www.mainelearns.org/ MLTI initiative...
- Hand out laptops
- Monitor them, after all even though they are inside a protictive proxy server, sometimes bad things get past that...
- Cut off the entire school system, if necessary, to protect the students.
- Fear among students that anything interesting will be blocked. taking the laptops home only requires their parents pay for insurance against damage/loss. At a very reasonable (for the insurer) cost.
- Effective control of the laptops, since they actually belong to the government.
Well, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Though I wonder how much OLPCs would cost v. iBooks, and how much more/less useful they would be. The OLPC could use a big Stateside order, eh?
Don't hold yer breath, chummy...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.
It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."
People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.
Another related essay:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"