err... we've been doing what Dunkelzahn suggests for about a year and a half here. My husband runs a small general IT services company, and we've set up both friends' household networks and business clients with homebrew router/firewalls (and are running one at home, of course). We have never spent more than $30 on one of these machines - that's case/mb/power supply, parts, the whole bit; and they're running embedded Linux.
We've had nothing but good reports back, and these super-cheap machines are part of what allow us to cut deals to get our non-profit customers online at minimal cost.
Interesting point, and I think your last two sentences are the most important. I'm homeschooling my two kids (7, 8 next month, and 4) and my older child has his own computer and net connection. We use the computer constantly. He has several different search engines and portals bookmarked and knows when each is appropriate. When looking something up, he knows to check several different sites, and ask questions if the answers differ. He knows that information on the web often comes with an agenda, and has more than a few times observed that agenda in action, or I've pointed it out to him. He knows when he's being condescended to, or spoonfed. ("Yahooligans has silly stupid baby stuff. I'm going to the grownup engine.")
He also sees me stress about the quality of what this household puts up on the web (my personal site, and my husband's business site). He knows, although at this age I'm not sure that he could articulate it, that the value and danger of the net is in the freedom-to-publish. The "sanctity of tomfoolery" idea that you're talking about, to me, has always been a lot more about books than about the net - it's a vast investment, either of other peoples' confidence in you (via a publishing house) or of your own time and money (via self-publishing) to create and distribute a book; to do the same with a website, all you really need is access to the machine that, these days, can be gotten for a ridiculously small amount of money. This creates the opportunity for some truly extraordinary material, in terms of both informational integrity and originality, that otherwise wouldn't be available, but it also hands a soapbox to every idiot. I don't think this concept is lost on kids, who are a lot more flexible of mind than we adults often give them credit for.
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We've had nothing but good reports back, and these super-cheap machines are part of what allow us to cut deals to get our non-profit customers online at minimal cost.
Interesting point, and I think your last two sentences are the most important. I'm homeschooling my two kids (7, 8 next month, and 4) and my older child has his own computer and net connection. We use the computer constantly. He has several different search engines and portals bookmarked and knows when each is appropriate. When looking something up, he knows to check several different sites, and ask questions if the answers differ. He knows that information on the web often comes with an agenda, and has more than a few times observed that agenda in action, or I've pointed it out to him. He knows when he's being condescended to, or spoonfed. ("Yahooligans has silly stupid baby stuff. I'm going to the grownup engine.")
He also sees me stress about the quality of what this household puts up on the web (my personal site, and my husband's business site). He knows, although at this age I'm not sure that he could articulate it, that the value and danger of the net is in the freedom-to-publish. The "sanctity of tomfoolery" idea that you're talking about, to me, has always been a lot more about books than about the net - it's a vast investment, either of other peoples' confidence in you (via a publishing house) or of your own time and money (via self-publishing) to create and distribute a book; to do the same with a website, all you really need is access to the machine that, these days, can be gotten for a ridiculously small amount of money. This creates the opportunity for some truly extraordinary material, in terms of both informational integrity and originality, that otherwise wouldn't be available, but it also hands a soapbox to every idiot. I don't think this concept is lost on kids, who are a lot more flexible of mind than we adults often give them credit for.