Earlier this month is was reported that the Birmingham, Alabama school district was going to be the first to offer the One Laptop per Child (http://laptop.org/) in America (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1525219). This story caught my attention because it hits close to home (I will leave it up to your imagination in which way.) The basic idea is that eighth-grade Birmingham students will get the laptops at the beginning of the year and then turn them in at the end. If the laptops, which look like some sort of fancy toy, are lost or stolen, they can be remotely disabled.

Now comes the interesting questions. What happens when the very innocent and well intentioned city council sees some of the darker sides to giving every eighth-grader a laptop?

Now I don’t know if you can remember all the way back to this time in your life but I do remember a few bits and pieces. One of the biggest things on the mind of an eighth-graders mind is p0rn. The best place to find p0rn is on the Internet. The best way to get on the Internet is to have your very own laptop. I think you can see where I am going with this. The question is what will the council think when they start getting laptops turned in with 30 gigabytes of adult content.

The second issue is what happens when you look at lots of free p0rn, spyware. Could this be the beginning of the next one million member bot net courtesy of the one laptop per child initiative?

While we are on the subject, how will the laptops be monitored? I am assuming it is up to the individual families to provide access to the Internet. But will the city place some sort of content filter to prevent to aforementioned problems? When you are taking this object into a private home, will doing something like this effect your civil liberties?

And what of the poor parents who get a call telling them that little Jimmy has placed an encrypted volume on the computer or hacked the computer in some unforeseen way? Are the parent held responsible for the actions of their children even though they were forced into giving their child a laptop?

The bottom line is I think giving every child is a great idea, you just better be prepared for what may happen. Knowing how city council members think, they may not expect any of these bad things to happen.

I highly support having laptops in school. I bring mine to school everyday to take notes and it's really helpful. Just like any gadgetry, teachers just will have to monitor them. Many private schools in Toronto are starting to adopt laptops into their way of teaching. Some prominent ones include the York School and Greenwood. They provide all students machines and they install all the security and monitoring software into the system by default. Thereby, whenever the child is connected to the school's network. The administrator knows every move the child is making, including if they are playing games on their laptops.

My school unfortunately doesn't have that. However, more and more kids are bringing their own laptop, but we don't get network connections at all.

xboxrulz

I bring my laptop to school amost every day and I must say it's not such a good thing. For excercises in the laboratoria it's a great device, I have all the applications and settings on my laptop and I don't have to copy everything from the computers back to my laptop (and because having a laptop means having 2 screens, I can easily put a pdf on one screen while working on the other ).
In theory classes I think a laptop isn't such a good idea. Whenever I get bored I open Opera and start surfing and because I can't focus on 2 things I quickly forget I'm in class ...
Taking notes goes a lot faster on a piece of paper, the possibilities are unlimited whereas you're quite limited when you do it on your laptop. Btw. some people don't like to learn from a computer screen, I myself am such a person; I still prefer learning from a piece of paper .

Oh, and don't forget, children can be very creative when it comes to getting what they want. You can install dozens of security systems, children will always find a way to bypass them .

ps. it's also very annoying when other people start gaming during classes, I'm easily distracted so my attention is being pulled away to the little gaming caracter flying over the screen.

That sounds REALLY great!!!! A laptop! There are a lot of good effect on students' everyday life.
Students can do their homework faster. Typing is faster than writing. But I hope students will not use the computer to copy other's homework.

writing yes, making notations during classes, absolutely not. As I've already said, you can't easily draw on a laptop, so there'll be less structure in the notes. Also, writing formulas is a lot faster than typing them (in maths I write my notes and I'm at least 4 times faster than my neighbour who always writes them on his laptop).

Laptop is also very comfortable in University, to show your stuff and what you have done, for example in programming lectures you can directly write the code to the Laptop and etc. Sometimes when something works on your end, for example a compiled program and doesn't work on the University computers due to DirectX version or .NET - when it really sucks. When you bring your Laptop, you can feel relaxed, because you know it will work the way it should ;D

And due to usually in all the University you get wireless access to the Internet, you can browse or do anything you want while you have free time, of course it scares me a bit, due to people will get much more reserved and won't talk to much with their group mates if more and more people will get a Laptop

Yeah, when I was in college there was never a question. If I had to demo a project, it was always on my own laptop -- no way I was going to take any chances with the shitty machines the university "maintained".

Generally speaking though, giving every child a laptop can only be completely beneficial if they are completely integrated into classroom learning; i.e., using the integrated mesh networking on the OLPC laptops so exams can be taken via the lappies, and in class activities can be done this way.

If you fail to integrate the laptops into learning, kids will probably use them to goof off; and adults will generally just find something more interesting to do on them. I used to work on my CS assignments during my gen-ed classes all the time in college. It was kinda just what we all did.

Untill they make up the rule that all your projects must run on the software that is provided on the computers they have in the laboratoria . The reason is very simple, if you make something, the teachers want to try it on their computer too (when you're not watching so they can take their time to find errors ).
It's a very annoying rule imho. I've made an app in Netbeans on my laptop but my laptop has Java1.6 installed whereas the computer in school have Java1.5 installed. Guess what, it won't work in Java1.5 .

ummm... sorry to break it to you, but I take down all my math notes on my laptop . This is exactly what is written on the board. Not much formatting lost. Sure, the graph is missing its x and y numbers, but it's only a sketch, not a precise thing.

Here's an example:


I take Advanced Functions in grade 12 (Ontario Curriculum) and here's a screenshot of my math notes.

xboxrulz

I'm with wutske, the only class i didn't use my laptop in is math. I found is so much easier to just write in down the my book or on paper. Then again, our entire textbook for maths was on the computer - so that could have come in handy!

Maybe you could try introducing tablet pc's that will still allow students to 'write' down the stuff like maths and still have a laptop. My old school let us have laptops on the condition that we weren't allowed to connect to the network (virus' and the such!) which was a real pain. We had to use a usb thumb drive every time we wanted to get something from the net or print something on the college network!

If the schools are going to supply laptops to students, they should be able to monitor the useage of them as per any other computer. I know that we had the computers totally locked out for limited (student) users which meant they could not change a single setting on the computer. This would be ok for school-issue laptops, but if students bring their own - the school wouldn't be able to do that.

Still, I believe that computers for students is going to be the way of the future, we will see eventually every student has their own computer and things learnt in class will be available to the students via a school network. I remember back in the old days (and this is going back many years) in primary school (years 3 and 4) we had a computer lab of about 12 computers for a school of 300 or so students as well as 3 library terminals. Just before i left they had upgraded to a single computer in each classroom (totaling about 30 computers in total). Its amazing how much its changed.