Laptop Background...

Here is a brief letter exchange between myself \[bracketed text\] and a
local professor (*italics),* a vocal opponent of the project, prior to a
legislative vote two years ago....

Professor wrote:

*My goal is quality education. Technology does not equal quality.*

\[This is a straw man argument. No proponent of technology would say
that technology equals quality.\]

*You\'re right. We can\'t put the genie back in the bottle. But I don\'t
see better students because of it. I\'ve been teaching the same sorts of
students here in Maine for 28 years. The kinds of students don\'t
change. University College was and is*

*pretty much open admissionMy writing students are dumber than ever. Oh,
they\'re plenty bright, but they have been dumbed down by dependence on
spellcheck and grammar check, and whatever else is*

*designed to keep them from understanding the whys and wherefores of the
English language,*

\[I have taught writing for years also, and I think the "what else"
above is the greater cause. I mean our culture. When I was young I used
to watch Dick Cavett on late night (while I did my homework.) Today,
they watch Jay Leno. Aside from the incredible coarsening of culture,
there is real difference in the use of language. I believe the culture
is changing and yes, media is helping that, but that doesn't mean we
should hide the keyboard from the student who must use it to transcribe
the written language. The automobile is clearly a net negative for our
society, but only the very wealthy can avoid learning to drive.\]

*... not to mention what constitutes a sentence.*

*Read the article, \"Adolescent Apocalypse\" in this month\'s Atlantic
Monthly. It speaks to the limits I\'m concerned about. My night students
this semester chalk a lot of it up to GameBoy (whatever that is) and
Nintendo. They say many kids lose the distinction between reality and
virtual reality. Too many grow obsessed with mythic violence. They also
grow obese, and King wants a machine in their laps.*

\[I should warn you that the retired professor with a copy of the
Atlantic Monthly under her arm is a caricature we all speak of as the
bane of k-12 board meetings. Belaboring the obvious to a group that
fights these battles on a daily basis doesn't endear. Neither does
denying today's tools to those who must use them to earn their bread in
a few short years.\]

*Let them use libraries. Let them feel the texture of the printed page
with different sizes and prints and textures. Let them search the
stacks‑‑learn the thrill of discovery. Sadly, I find that computers have
narrowed their research lives.*

\[What about the leather chairs and oak tables? I too, am nostalgic for
these things, but it won't bring them back. Whatever's left of them is
like a game preserve, a shadow of its former range. Research is
electronic now, and we can't bring the old days back.\]

*I get computer‑plagiarized papers and speeches. Students rarely get by
with it in my classes, but they\'re plenty used to getting away with
it.*

This project is not about going from paper to computer. That's already
happened, and we're already dealing with plagiarism, copyright issues,
etc. This is just about cleaning up the inefficiencies and inequities.

*We need good computer labs in every school, as I said.*

\[The lab is an unworkable model. It doesn't answer the question of "how
many computers?" It's like putting pencils in a lab. It focuses people's
attention on the tool, rather than the work that is done. Kids don't
need computers all the time, and they don't need them in their face or
taking up desktop space which could be used for something else. Smaller,
lighter, devices will actually be less intrusive, not more.\]

*Increasing numbers of homes have computers. I wonder what percentage of
homes really doesn't have access. Before long, they will be as common as
TVs, if they aren\'t already.*

*You said it right. The ATM was really about getting the Internet pipe
into the school. The whole thing was, and remains, a guise.*

\[Actually, it was conceived as in interactive video network, without
the Internet. I and many other people insisted that the Internet be
included in the bandwidth, because we could use it in a much more
diverse way. We could see the video network as a vendor driven
boondoggle, and were trying to salvage some usability.\]

*How cynical to get the state wired under the guise of education! It's
not different with the laptops. Why are we subsidizing Apple?*

\[Apple came into the bid process, which was speced for Ford Escorts,
and offered Camry's with automatic and air. On balance, they were the
best offer.\]

*Who has stock in all of this?*

\[Yes, there are many conflicts of interest, but any vendor would have
those connections in a state of this size. ValCom and Dell have as many
friends in the state as Apple, and Apple would have been the harder
choice to sell in a PC world, so I figure they did their best. They were
going to get second guessed and accused of conflict no matter who they
went with on something this big.\]

*This is BUSINESS, let\'s face it. Well then, call it business, and
don\'t siphon off the education budget as we did to get this state wired
(a la Connick). Hello MBNA. Don\'t siphon off education funds to
subsidize the hungry maw of technology .*

\[Actually, technology is a required element in every school budget, as
it is in every church, college, museum and corporate budget. It's like
the fuel oil and the electricity. We need computers (and quite a few of
them; more than what is currently in place) just to automate the basic
clerical and management functions of school today. The cost of this
infrastructure will be about 3.5% of the school budgets. That's the
national average being spent today, and though it doesn't provide a
stable network , it is a fair estimate that by the time Maine gets to
this level (it is currently at 1.8% of budget) the true costs will lower
to meet us somewhere around this figure. One of the ways to reduce costs
is statewide purchasing. Also, the K-12 LANs (local area computer
networks) are currently a volunteer-installed snake pit of shaky wiring
and cheap devices; they're not going to get us ten years down the road.
The state program will push us to a clean, wireless, and professionally
installed (outsourced) network infrastructure. (no cheaper than new
buses but just as necessary to the work.)\]

*I am not anti‑technology. I have a G3 laptop. I write the kinds of
books that are made possible by the computer‑‑first‑person biographies.
However, valuing Technology appropriately and providing laptops for 7th
graders are two different things.*

*By the way, who are you?*

*Sincerely,*

I am the curriculum coordinator for SAD#39 (Buckfield, a small rural
Maine school district.) My specialization is the role of technology in
school change. I'm as scared as anybody of its negatives, but I want to
use it to make a more humane system, above all to strike a blow against
the tyrannical monotony of the group pace in the classroom. I'd also
like to use it for basic improvements, such as letting parents see their
kids' report cards from home on the web, or using the grade book
software to eliminate some of the grosser abuses (daily zeros for
behavior, etc.) of grading, using database technology to record student
individual progress, helping to get quick reports on whether certain
discipline infractions are going up or down, helping to analyze student
and staff survey and performance data more easily (for instance, getting
a scatter plot of your classroom grades compared to the same students'
MEA scores, to see anomalies or see if there is a gender bias, or
whatever.) These changes all require a working computer infrastructure
of the kind that colleges and companies take for granted, but we are
begrudged here at K-12 because everyone is so sure they know that
whatever tools were good enough for the old days are good enough for us,
even though they use computers themselves both at work and at home.

Thanks,

JoeMakley