Hundred Dollar Laptop

There’s recently been a lot of hoopla surrounding the $100 laptop initiative from the gang over at MIT’s MediaLab. While I think it’s really great that peole have been thinking about how to reach out to developing countries and foster education, I think laptops are completely the wrong route.

Sid Steward, in his blog at O’Reilly Network, writes:

I hate to be a negative nancy, but all this press over the $100 laptop gets me thinking… and doubting. It is supposed to help schoolchildren, but where is the content? Where is the curriculum? What is it actually supposed to teach?

– Negroponte as The Music Man

I’ve surprised a number of people by standing against computer use in education. I don’t really think computers have any place in schools as part of the regular curriculum. At the extreme, I worry that schools will become like McDonalds where the Teacher is only there to act as a robot handing out materials leaving all the thinking to the “magic machine”. (If you haven’t been to a modern fastfood joint where you can enter your order and pay all from a little terminal while a drowntrodden human being whips up your culinary delight, you’re really missing out.)

I completely agree with Sid’s closing question:

Finally, what is the advantage of ‘one laptop per child’ over ‘$100 in books per child,’ or rather ‘$100 of school supplies per child.’

Indeed, what additional value do we think a $100 laptop will provide that quality books wouldn’t?

Broken Web Site

It seems our move to the wonderful TextDrive wasn’t without incident. Our Movable Type installation is missing a critical perl module which is making the home page misbehave a bit (showing more entries than I want) and the comments system seems to be entirely broken with a 412 error (Precondition failed).

I’ve sent in support requests for both, so we’ll see what the response time is.

We’ve Moved

Maybe you’ve not noticed, but the URL for this Web site has changed to newburyportion.com.

We finally had it with the lame ass, losers over at HostExcellence and moved up to TextDrive. Part of the reason for the move is that I’ll be able to run TurboGears on the TextDrive server and I get ssh access to the TextDrive server. And of course, it doesn’t suck.

Sadly it costs more, but then I suspect we’ll get what we pay for: servers that don’t crash constantly (4 out of 5 times I try to save an article I got a server error with HostExcellence) and much better customer service.

Plus our domain name now makes sense…