Laptop Lashback

Dangerously Irrelevant has a piece called $2,000 pencils where he links to a piece about a a "Laptop Lashback". It seems that throwing laptops in schools doesn't really change things and that what we have are $2,000 pencils.

Just adding stuff doesn't make a difference

The typical tech-advocate response to these technology-doesn't-help arguments is that of course just adding technology doesn't help. You have to do lots of training and so on to reform how people conceive teaching and learning. Here's another response. There was a widely reported Productivity Paradox discussed in business. It seems that in the 1970s and 1980s businesses invested a bunch of money in computers and that 20 years later there were no signs that businesses were more productive, at least not in any ways that economists were able to measure. As it turns out some years earlier, businesses invested a bunch of money in using electricity rather than having their own power plants to run their machines. It took about 40 years for that to really pay off.

The pay-offs don't come until there is a big change in how the tools are integrated into whatever it is that we do. I'm not sure that we can train our way into making these changes happen just a whole lot faster, but I do think that we're coming close to the point that some changes will happen. It seems that now most literate humans on the planet are fairly comfortable with using a word processor, email, and the World Wide Web. And so are kids. Most humans are unwilling to do much work involving learning and information without these tools.

One of the comments on the Laptop link above mentions a study that shows that kids who got lectured and those who did some technology-based learning scored similarly on a post-test. A year later, however, there were dramatic differences in the two groups recollections of the material and their notion of what history is. The stuff does make a difference, it's just that we're not using measures that showing it.

Laptops are too expensive

I agree. They're expensive. They're hard to maintain. The batteries die. Desks aren't designed for kids to have them. My idea: Linux Terminal Servers (or maybe Edubuntu, which is really the same thing). Linux used to be for crazy people (like me), but lately it just works. I've been throwing these things in classrooms without doing any training for three years now, and they just work, and it has changed how teachers and students work.

And they're cheap. In my most recent demonstration I used in-place hardware and only installed the Free/Open Source Software. Old iMacs, which were still running OS9 and virtually unusable, became fine thin clients. Let me say it again: computers that no one was using because they were too slow started to work like fast new computers.

The magic is that only one machine, has any software installed on it, and it runs all of the programs. The old computers are relegated to displaying information and taking input from the keyboard and mouse. It doesn't take much to do this. No software is installed on the clients (it is ALL loaded over the network), so installing a program on the server makes it immediately available to all of the computers. (It took the tech in the last school a very long time to understand that it didn't matter what version of the OS was installed on the hard drive of the clients since the hard drive was not used at all.) Everyone has his or her own account, so wherever they sit, their files, bookmarks and even silly stuff like desktop images are preserved. It's just like having your own computer except that you don't have to carry it around.