On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 10:07, Adrian Wells wrote:
Why? Realistically, do they sit in a cupboard for the hols (honestly?)...
Clearly not! There are two issues.
*People treat laptops worst than pool motor cars, they are usually subjected to even more careless misuse during the long teacher holidays and come back with damaged drives, cases & screens and it's not unusual to have to empty them of sand! legitimate use? Why should they and their kids mess up a resource that is then denied to others because of their stupidity and carelessness. If ya wanna mess with stuff (expensive kit that doesn't belong to you) , buy yer own!
Might have been a better strategy to subsidise or give tax relief for teachers buying their own laptops/desktops for all the reasons here. Let them decide and then take responsibility. Breeding dependency culture and developing a "Nanny State" is IMHO counter-productive. <SNIP>
. The less tinkering and options to change the better.
Just set the Machines up so you need to be admin to install anything. Ownership confers responsibility, so let those who want to tinker tinker but make them own the thing, if they mess it up for themselves they have to sort it out. Its why shared laptops is a bad idea in the first place. You could produce something like Mandrakemove, so each user had his/her own CD and USB RAM making the machine itself just a dumb piece of hardware, I suppose. <SNIP>
This multiple method approach has been both the guiding light and the downfall of the PC since it tends to both provide a soup that spawns evolution and one that produces lots of naff code. The view taken by apple was, "if you write a program, here's the code to close it - it works!" On the PC, there's more ways to close a program than you can shake a stick at. And when Mentor (dolphin) falls over, some wagg will tell you that you closed it the wrong way! What they meant was, that they put their "close down code" in the wrong place :-)
Maybe a better approach would be to take technology education seriously and put far more emphasis on understanding some of the key issues involved in using technology rather than assuming that everything is fine as long as you can make fairly superficial use of Microsoft Office. The level of expectations in understanding the fundamentals of IT compared to mathematics and science is abysmally low. I think more focus on *fewer* but more *fundamental* applications would help and it would also save money because without the dependency on masses of expensive and often distracting software it would be easier to deploy FLOSS systems more quickly, easier to train teachers and increase the quality of transferable skills in the most important areas. Regards, -- ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>