Re: [school-discuss] Education Week: "Schools Combine Netbooks, Open Source"

["Mr. Klock" <math@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Yes, this is "Part" of a solution.  However, it's just the easy part.
> 
> The staff training and curricula to develop/use is the harder part
> (and multi-year).

Yep!  I've done a couple of sort of back-of-the-envelope proposals for 1-to-1 netbook plans (for a high-poverty public school of about 800 kids, in Chicago).  I was using a lot of OLPC's logic (student ownership, which in my high-school context means that you give the device to each kid, and you help them take care of it, and they get to keep it as a graduation present).  Buying 800-1000 cheap mobiles is the easy part (and wouldn't even be that hard to fund, frankly).  It would even be cost-feasible for us to give new netbooks to every freshman, and to let them trade-in for a new one when they're seniors (to keep up with obsolescence, thus giving the graduation-present angle more appeal).  Even the build, management and roll-out to make them robust and stable platforms are solvable and not very expensive.

The really expensive part is developing the electrical infrastructure to make them usable all day (if you try to run them off battery only, you'll only get a few hours, and the battery will quickly degrade) and the really HARD part is developing the faculty's capacity to use these tools on a regular, routine basis (at least as often as you'd use a textbook, was my rule-of-thumb).  

 James Klock