Shouldn’t Every Student have Access to a Netbook as a Minimum?
By Paul McMahon on Jun 1, 2009 in Appropriate Hardware for Education, Learning for a Flat World and tagged applications, mobile, netbooks
I have just returned from this workshop advertised at the Centre for Information Technology in Education at Hong Kong University.The workshop was dedicated to taking us through the use of tools that could be used on mobile phones but were really very basic. You can see them here.
I was behaved and kept my mouth shut (uncharacteristically) but I really wanted to scream out “Why are we hamstringing kids with such primitive tools in 2009?!” The argument of the presenters, who were from the US, was that every student would not be able to present with a computer so why not make the most of the computers in their pocket? I really want to take issue with the first part of that statement. Surely in an age where every professional in even the most basic of desk jobs uses a computer, why are we still wondering if they might be of use in schools?
Graham Wegner recently reflected on this failure to move ahead in schools in a recent post he called Immunity. Whilst governments make decisions to try to find funding to put computers in front of kids in poor and remote communities, it amazes me that schools who can afford the technology are still wondering if they should do anything with technology in classrooms. We know that getting students to create, the top level on the new Blooms Revised Taxonomy is what we should be aiming to do and yet, we still think that using mobile phones, essentially tools for delivery of content, might do the trick in schools.
Shouldn’t we at least be saying that there is a minimum spec tool that first world economies should be insisting on for students, especially if we want them to be used for creation of digital artifacts that demonstrate that our students are creators, collaborators and all round thinkers?
