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One laptop per student?
Recently this topic has flared up again, at least for me since the local government has decided that every high-school student should have their very own laptop. With the first year of high-school each student will get a laptop that they are supposed to use throughout their whole high-school studies, and which they can purchase for a symbolic sum after they graduate. This is all fine and dandy, I don't mind my tax money being spent in such a way. I do, however, have some rather large reservations in this topic.
I'm a teacher in training, so to speak, and I have seen the way schools work from both sides of the fence. There are a great deal of challenges in how this scenario can play out and how it is most likely going to play out, mostly for the teachers but to a good degree also for the students.
Computers have been in schools for roughly some 20 to 25 years now, depending on where you live and what kind of an interest the school has had in them. In all this time the way in which they have been used and incorporated into the teaching process has practically stayed the same. Or perhaps more correctly said, the way in which they have not been incorporated into the teaching process. They are still regarded as this thing that sits on a table in the computer lab, used for "learning IT" or "learning computers". A description I throughly despise and that in no way reflects how the tool can be used as an aid to learning.
Teachers are woefully undereducated in the ways of using a computer for educational purposes and quite overburdened with bureaucratic paperwork. There is very little time available for existing teachers to get a firm grasp of how computers are able to enhance teaching, unless they have been very interested personally and kept up-to-date on their own time. If a teacher cannot see the potential greatness that can come from using a computer in a creative and innovative way, the usage of the device in teaching is probably doomed from the start.
Materials for learning are still analogue paper and books, more often than not. The educational software I have seen is often ancient, ugly or not made by someone with knowledge or experience in teaching and how learning works. Or a combination of them all. It's far from what the machine is able to serve up in terms of engaging learning materials, rich in not only text but also in video and sounds. Something that seems to have escaped 99% of those who built "educational software". Hopefully this has already changed or at the very least is changing. If there is an intent of using computers in education as have been proposed, the materials have to be available in some manner of digital format. Otherwise the laptop won't be anything more than a glorified notepad for the students.
When we do finally "teach IT" or whatever other moronic term is being used at the moment, we teach the kids how to use products, applications from a certain company, not a concept or an idea of how to use something. Utterly dangerous as we cement their expectations of what you should use and what to expect from a computer in general. If anything, there should be a multitude of different systems and applications available and good directions by the teachers in how to deal with the differences. I have yet to find a single instance of this happening in real life and not even at the fine institution known as a university.
And lest we forget that computers are not really well suited for schools, in all honesty. There are a lot of distractions readily available for students to spend their time with instead of learning what we as a society have decided they should learn. Then there are the dangers of students knowing more about them than the teachers, which is the most common scenario I would imagine. Although I have started seeing tendencies that kids are fairly computer-illiterate as well, being able to log into Facebook or whatnot and not too much more.
I'm not arguing that students shouldn't get a laptop of their own to do their studies on, absolutely not. I'm just voicing my concern that this might be a half-though through project that won't really change much in the way teaching is being carried out and have been carried out for some time. I'm carefully hoping for the best, but expecting no real change at all. That way I can only be positively surprised later on.
Robert Falck
Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.
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Robert Falck