Food for Thought-Laptops or Trapper Keepers?
It is a miserably humid day in NYC. Luckily for me, my apartment stays relatively cool without the need for A/C. Thanks to a low floor and high ceilings, I think I will manage to get through today
Onto more pertinent matters. I read Gary Stager’s piece on the declining costs of laptops vs the stagnant costs of school supplies. Gary highlighted the fact that these cost curves are getting perilously close to meeting. Gary was asking why we are wasting resources on traditional learning implements, when the ultimate learning implement, an Internet connected laptop is only a fraction more expensive.
It is a powerful question and one worth pondering….however I think the answer is in the comments to his post. In particular, the infrastructure for adopting such a change is not really in place. That infrastructure is both technical and human. This infrastructure excuse is miserable as it is cuts the legs out from so many great proposals, but it is ultimately a powerful reason for saying no.
Infrastructure is the key to all things and it is a process that is long and drawn out. However, sometimes an event can trigger explosive growth and change. That trigger must be an economic opportunity where private resources come into play. What is that trigger in education?
1. The massive demographic shift- In California the shortage of teachers will be particularly acute, though I have looked at the stats from the Bureau of Labor Stats and it looks like nationally we are going to lose about 1/3 of our teachers to retirement in the next 7 years.
It means that there are a lot of teacher openings to be filled by recent graduates or job transfers. The infrastructure of the human component just changed and they need help to be the best teachers they can be. Will the private sector fulfill this need by financing laptops for every child and a deep interconnectivity between classrooms and teachers?
2. What about broadband speeds and costs- According to this there are a whole lot of people in this world with faster broadband than the US and at a fraction of the cost. The Internet and Green Energy seem to be the long term impactful technologies to our world, so if the US is falling behind on our Internet what is the effect on our ability to grow our economy.
What Does This Mean?
Seems to me that if the US Government wakes up to the fact that our telecom/cable monopolies are derailing our ability to grow the economy, there is going to be a movement to solve the problem. That movement will probably be a big free market push to wire us up, or more than likely wireless us up. With a deep national investment both financially and psychically in changing our high speed Internet fortunes I would bet that our schools will be direct recipients of this high speed technology largesse. Now we have the infrastructure where laptops make sense in school.
I guess my question is, in 5 years will students be doing their back-to-school shopping at Apple and Best Buy or at Staples ?
Another food for thought: How many of you use listservs to find teaching ideas? What is the biggest downside to these listservs? Ryan Bretag wrote a response (it’s at the bottom) to my comment on why teachers might be resistant to adopting aggregators as their first foray into the wonders of Web 2.0. In his response he mentioned that a combination of Ning networks and Listservs may already be the tools that teachers need to find valuable teaching resources.