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A Notebook in Every SatchelThursday, January 07, 2005By Bob Johnstone How long will it be before every schoolkid has his or her own laptop? This is a question that I have been asking for the past eight years, ever since I walked into Methodist Ladies College, the world's first laptop school, here in Melbourne, Australia, where I live. MLC began its first laptop classes in 1990. By the time I got there, all of the 2000-plus girls in the school had their own machines. And they were using them to do remarkable things. It was a new kind of open-ended learning that - it seemed to me - had changed the balance of power in the classroom, in favour of the students. Fascinated, I followed the phenomenon of laptops in schools all over the world. I wrote up my research in a book, Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning, which was published in September 2003. (The title has puzzled some reviewers, especially those unfamiliar with the Sex Pistols. My point is simply that it is the learning that is done on the laptops which is important, not the machines themselves.) Among other things, the book traces the history of the laptop. The story of how Alan Kay conceived the Dynabook, the ur-laptop, at Xerox PARC is well known. What tends to be forgotten is that Kay conceived the Dynabook as "a children's machine", after seeing primary school kids struggling with clunky mainframe terminals in early experiments run in Boston classrooms by Seymour Papert. A children's machine had to be portable, so that the learning could take place anywhere. Today, some 35 years later, Kay's vision is finally becoming a reality. Witness, for example, the ever-larger laptop programs now being implemented in states and school districts around the US. Places like Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, which has recently begun issuing 67,000 laptops to its students. Or Michigan, which has proposed a program involving 130,000 machines, one for every twelve-year-old in the state. Back in 1970, Papert said "If every kid had a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every kid to have". Notebooks are still too pricey for every kid to have one, but the trend is clear. Driven by Moore's Law and a glut in LCD screens, the price of entry-level laptops has already dropped below US$500. Further reductions will follow. Cost is in fact no longer the main obstacle to the adoption of a one-kid-one-computer policy. By far the biggest challenge we face is showing teachers how to use laptops in the classroom in meaningful ways. Most teachers are not comfortable with technology. Many simply do not know what to do with computers. Or even what can be done ("I already use a wordprocessor - what else is there?"). Feelings of helplessness are particularly prevalent among older teachers. But younger teachers are not going to provide an automatic solution to the problem, either. They typically graduate from training college knowing how to wordprocess, spreadsheet, and email - but precious little else. Moreover, they do not have the experience to see how technology can compliment their lessons. That is why I am now working on a new book. Its aim is to inspire teachers to use laptops in their classrooms, using as models what other teachers have done. Hopefully it won't be long now before every kid has his or her own laptop. The key is ensuring that the machines will make a substantive improvement to their learning. |
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