5.4 Ethics and laptops: identifying social responsibility issues  (Page 2/5)

1. However, adopting laptops also presented problems that critics quickly brought forth.
2. Teachers would need to learn how to use laptop computers and would have to change their teaching to accomodate them in the classroom.
3. Apparent cost savings disappeared upon further, closer examination. For example, it became clear that textbook publishers would not so easily give up the revenues they had come to depend upon that came from textbook purchases for public school students. Updates from downloads could turn out to be more expensive and eductional software could be coded to restrict access and dissemination.
4. Further studies indicated that technical support costs would run two to three times initial outlays. Keeping laptop hardware and software up and running required technical support and continued investment.
5. Texas found that while some school districts--the richer ones--had already begun projects to integrate computing technology, the poorer school districts would require considerable financial support.

To deal with these problems, Texas carried out several pilot projects that examined the effectiveness of laptop integration in select school districts. While several successes were reported a series of problems arose that led Texas Board of Educaton officials to postpone the laptop project. First, pilot projects depended on donations from private computing vendors. While some were forthcoming, others failed to deliver hardware on time and provided only minimal technical support. Second, teachers resisted laptop integration due to the extensive investment of time required to appropriate computing skills and the difficulty of modifying existing curricula and teaching styles to accomodate laptop hardware and software. Third, at that time the available educational software, such as digitalized textbooks, was expensive, inadequately developed, and narrowly focused on curricular areas such as writing and math practice. Teachers also began to develop more comprehensive and philosophical criticisms of laptop use. Education specialist, Larry Cuban, argued that while laptops provided good support for a vocational education, they failed to deliver on other educational goals such as teaching children how to interact with their peers and teachers and teaching children the civic virtues necessary to become active participants in a democratic form of government. Studies began to appear that argued that skills developed through computer use came at the expense of other, more social skills.

The Texas Laptop plan was never formally implemented beyond the pilot project phase. However, several computer integration projects have been carried out in other parts of the country. For example, Larry Cuban reports on computer integration projects carried out in Silicon Valley in California. MIT has developed a cheap laptop computer for use in developing nations. You can find a link to computer integration projects that have been implemented in Philadelphia public schools through the support of the Microsoft Foundation.