Mass. students in one district must buy $900 MacBooks for next semester

[thewayne]

There's also a lease option for $20-25 a month with an option to buy at the end of three years. And there's no mention as to how locked down the machines will be. They say that if you already have a Mac laptop, that it has to meet certain specifications, not that they're saying what those are.

It's arguable whether laptops are a help or hindrance in a classroom. It's definitely a good thing for homework and doing papers, but dividing your attention between typing notes and paying attention to the instructor would seem to impair absorption of deeper topics according to some studies. Plus it's usually hugely faster to make sketches of drawings on paper than to try to do it in a software program.

The educational software market is very platform-specific. There are open source projects currently and in development that try to be multi-platform, but the quality of OSS varies wildly. I've heard one school implementation that really impressed me: they installed monster VM servers and the students remote (RDP) in to their own virtual PC. It has a lot of advantages, it's a technology that I use for work to use my XP Pro box or VM (I have both) at work via RDP from my Mac. It's not perfect, VM's occasionally blue screen and reboot, but they do it a lot faster than physical boxes.

http://www.salemnews.com/local/x1910032546/In-Beverly-laptops-all-around-but-parents-have-to-pay

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/06/11/1952230/MA-High-School-Forces-All-Students-To-Buy-MacBooks

Comments

[silveradept]

Nothing like causing market lock-in at an early age just to have to go to school. Hopefully these are at least Intel Macs so that they can be loaded with OS of choice for outside of school applications...

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The article described them as $900 MacBooks, not MacBook Pros, and Apple dropped the PowerPC chip in favor of the Intel chipset a long time ago. In fact, IIRC, they made their last PowerPC chip 2-3 years ago, and 10.6 does not support PowerPC and went 64 bit.

So they could easily be dual-booted via Boot Camp or, like me, run a VM system. I have XP Pro and Ubuntu, I had Solaris at one point.

[silveradept]

Well, good for choice in that sense, but still - I'm not really fond of anyone that wants you to get locked into their market at an early age. Even though Microsoft has been doing it for years now.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

There were a number of very good comments in the Slashdot thread, many along the line of 'why do you need a laptop in school if it's not a computer class?' criticizing the education system not teaching fundamentals good enough for students to learn how to learn.

They talked about a class program where students could learn computer maintenance, a good thing IMO. I'm curious what their policy is going to be if someone is renting a laptop and it gets dropped or something. Are they going to require a security deposit, and if someone is going through the $20-25/month plan, could they afford such a deposit?

Lock-in sucks, regardless of who the vendor is. The university that I used to work at had both Mac and PC platforms, the serer closet was Novell. The Macs were mainly in the art department, which I think is a shame. I much preferred the community college that I worked at that had both Macs and PCs in the same lab, though the PCs were used lots more even for stupid stuff like just browsing online.

[silveradept]

Ooh, hadn't considered the break-replace fees if a rental gets busted.

Was very glad to have Mac and PC next to each other in all the university labs. Even some Sun stations for the engineering school.

And yeah, I suppose education should be about teaching kids how to learn and problem solve, shouldn't it?