Mediating Poverty, Nick Holland's comments
19 Aug 2005 03:54 PM / Filed in: Misc
As a follow-up to my Mediating Poverty, How So? post, Nick Holland, a very good friend whom I met through our common work on the OpenBSD Project, tells us this:
I wasn't sure if I should hit "reply" or "reply all" on this one. I am
rather proud of this one, so I hit "reply all", maybe someone else can
make something useful of my comments.
I did what Saad is suggesting...
Before I shut down my consulting business, I worked with a small charter
school, about 200 students in the 9th through 12th grades. Charter
schools are an experiment in the US in areas with failing public schools
-- they are publicly funded, but operate very differently from a public
school, typically managed by a for-profit company, typically non-union.
To say they are controversial is a horrible understatement. They have
been a mixed success -- some fail miserably, some succeed brilliantly.
However, they give alternatives to some of our students who would
otherwise have to go to hell-holes we sometimes call schools.
I build them a lab...
* Netware server, pulled out of my basement.
* Netware license, donated by a client of mine who was upgrading in such
a way that the old licenses were "available" (this was verifed with
Novell at the time). Netware 3.2, btw, runs great on 486 and low-end
Pentium systems.
* Tape drive: pulled out of my basement.
* 30 desktop computers, $40 each for PII-333MHz, 128M RAM, 6G HD.
* We got new keyboards and mice because the kids seemed to go nuts over
the idea that they were getting SOMETHING "new" -- even if it was a six
dollar mouse and a four dollar keyboard...which was vastly inferior to
the old IBM keyboards they already had, but we had some money left over,
we went for the grins.
* Windows 98 licenses are available without charge for donated computers
for schools. We may have played a little fast and lose here, as it
wasn't exactly "donated", but close...goodness knows I donated a lot of
time to make it all work.
* OpenOffice
* OpenBSD firewall (used one of their old computers for the FW, misc.
upgrades from my basement).
* Old 10/100 hubs donated by a client
* HP LaserJet 4si saved from dumpster from a client
* donated labor on the part of me, my dad, and a couple teachers
The result was a system which was incredibly cheap to install, very easy
to maintain, very stable, enough spare computers on the shelf to replace
ones in the lab that broke. The teacher I built this with had formerly
worked at a very afluent district in the area, she told me "her" lab was
vastly superior to the labs at her former employer, which were just put
in a year or two earlier with all brand new, very expensive HW and
software, in terms of ease of use, uptime, managability, recoverability
when something broke, and overall satisfaction.
This works. It works really well. I can't tell you how proud I was of
that system. It was the achieving of some goals I've had for over 25
years, and it worked very much as I expected.
There are problems, however.
A number of the students were upset over the fact that their "new"
computers weren't brand new. They wanted new, and didn't care about the
rest. They didn't care about the fact that none of them could type well
or write well, and few of them were even proficient readers.
A shocking number of the students couldn't care less about the age of
the machines, as long as they were Dells. Apparently, Dell has a very
effective marketing campaign, these high-grade IBM machines didn't do it
for them because they were not Dells.
In the US, this "experiment" would never happen at any normal public
school. I've watched the process in my local district, the purpose
there was to spend money and to have pictures of kids in front of Brand
New Computers, not actually getting anything done with them. It takes a
special teacher (which we had), it takes a special school management
(which we had), and it takes parents willing to look for results, not
name tags. That's all stuff that is harder to come by than money here.
All that being said...
At least in the US, computers in classrooms are so poorly used normally,
I have no particular desire to see more of them. The students aren't
learning Internet safety. They aren't learning how to do proper
research. They don't understand what is happening when they punch
something into google and it comes up with "the answer". At "My"
school, we took a stab at a lot of that...but no one else even tries.
Computers or teacher's saleries? I'd rather pay the teachers.
Computers or food for hungry school kids? I'd rather feed them.
Computers or books? I'd rather they learn the idea of good research in
books over typing stuff into google and seeing what comes out.
When I was in school, we were prevented from using encyclopedias,
because of the lack of diversity. Now, we let kids do all their
research "on line", and they have no tools to understand the stuff they
come across..what is good research? What is an authoritative source?
What is an expert opinion? What is a non-expert opinion? What is
someone just bad-mouthing or building up a product/person/idea? These
kids have no clue on this stuff. We did something to help a little by
teaching them web page creation (using Notepad, btw, not an HTML layout
program!), then published it, so they had some idea how little effort
was required, and how anyone could say ANYTHING on the 'net, but I'm not
sure how much of that sunk in. I had suggested that they do a
"wrong-research" project -- "prove" the holocaust didn't happen, "prove"
we didn't go to the moon, "prove" there was no slavery in the US, etc.,
not sure that ever happened, however.
Oddly, for a skeptic of computers in the classroom, I owe my later
schooling to a computer. I'm dyslexic and ADD, without a computer, I'm
functionally illiterate, I can not write by hand. The first time I
turned a paper in I wrote on a computer word processor (in 1983), I was
the first student to do so in my class -- and I nearly got expelled from
school for it, as it was so much better than anything I had ever written
before, it couldn't have been mine. Fortunately, my teacher had enough
faith in my intelegence that she didn't believe I'd ever cheat in a way
that she would catch, and believed me when I told her it was all my
work. However, I look at things now, over 20 years later...and I'd
still probably have the exact same problems in school I had then...the
answer would be sitting all around me, but it wouldn't be available to
help me in the ways I needed help. Twenty and twenty-five years ago,
everyone "knew" computers belonged in a classroom, but no one knew what
to do with them. Today...people still don't know what to do with
them...and they are sucking up huge amounts of education funding.
Anyway..much more I could write on this topic...it is very dear to me,
but I'm way overdue for bed. |-)
oh, btw: well written article, Saad. :)
Nick.
I wasn't sure if I should hit "reply" or "reply all" on this one. I am
rather proud of this one, so I hit "reply all", maybe someone else can
make something useful of my comments.
I did what Saad is suggesting...
Before I shut down my consulting business, I worked with a small charter
school, about 200 students in the 9th through 12th grades. Charter
schools are an experiment in the US in areas with failing public schools
-- they are publicly funded, but operate very differently from a public
school, typically managed by a for-profit company, typically non-union.
To say they are controversial is a horrible understatement. They have
been a mixed success -- some fail miserably, some succeed brilliantly.
However, they give alternatives to some of our students who would
otherwise have to go to hell-holes we sometimes call schools.
I build them a lab...
* Netware server, pulled out of my basement.
* Netware license, donated by a client of mine who was upgrading in such
a way that the old licenses were "available" (this was verifed with
Novell at the time). Netware 3.2, btw, runs great on 486 and low-end
Pentium systems.
* Tape drive: pulled out of my basement.
* 30 desktop computers, $40 each for PII-333MHz, 128M RAM, 6G HD.
* We got new keyboards and mice because the kids seemed to go nuts over
the idea that they were getting SOMETHING "new" -- even if it was a six
dollar mouse and a four dollar keyboard...which was vastly inferior to
the old IBM keyboards they already had, but we had some money left over,
we went for the grins.
* Windows 98 licenses are available without charge for donated computers
for schools. We may have played a little fast and lose here, as it
wasn't exactly "donated", but close...goodness knows I donated a lot of
time to make it all work.
* OpenOffice
* OpenBSD firewall (used one of their old computers for the FW, misc.
upgrades from my basement).
* Old 10/100 hubs donated by a client
* HP LaserJet 4si saved from dumpster from a client
* donated labor on the part of me, my dad, and a couple teachers
The result was a system which was incredibly cheap to install, very easy
to maintain, very stable, enough spare computers on the shelf to replace
ones in the lab that broke. The teacher I built this with had formerly
worked at a very afluent district in the area, she told me "her" lab was
vastly superior to the labs at her former employer, which were just put
in a year or two earlier with all brand new, very expensive HW and
software, in terms of ease of use, uptime, managability, recoverability
when something broke, and overall satisfaction.
This works. It works really well. I can't tell you how proud I was of
that system. It was the achieving of some goals I've had for over 25
years, and it worked very much as I expected.
There are problems, however.
A number of the students were upset over the fact that their "new"
computers weren't brand new. They wanted new, and didn't care about the
rest. They didn't care about the fact that none of them could type well
or write well, and few of them were even proficient readers.
A shocking number of the students couldn't care less about the age of
the machines, as long as they were Dells. Apparently, Dell has a very
effective marketing campaign, these high-grade IBM machines didn't do it
for them because they were not Dells.
In the US, this "experiment" would never happen at any normal public
school. I've watched the process in my local district, the purpose
there was to spend money and to have pictures of kids in front of Brand
New Computers, not actually getting anything done with them. It takes a
special teacher (which we had), it takes a special school management
(which we had), and it takes parents willing to look for results, not
name tags. That's all stuff that is harder to come by than money here.
All that being said...
At least in the US, computers in classrooms are so poorly used normally,
I have no particular desire to see more of them. The students aren't
learning Internet safety. They aren't learning how to do proper
research. They don't understand what is happening when they punch
something into google and it comes up with "the answer". At "My"
school, we took a stab at a lot of that...but no one else even tries.
Computers or teacher's saleries? I'd rather pay the teachers.
Computers or food for hungry school kids? I'd rather feed them.
Computers or books? I'd rather they learn the idea of good research in
books over typing stuff into google and seeing what comes out.
When I was in school, we were prevented from using encyclopedias,
because of the lack of diversity. Now, we let kids do all their
research "on line", and they have no tools to understand the stuff they
come across..what is good research? What is an authoritative source?
What is an expert opinion? What is a non-expert opinion? What is
someone just bad-mouthing or building up a product/person/idea? These
kids have no clue on this stuff. We did something to help a little by
teaching them web page creation (using Notepad, btw, not an HTML layout
program!), then published it, so they had some idea how little effort
was required, and how anyone could say ANYTHING on the 'net, but I'm not
sure how much of that sunk in. I had suggested that they do a
"wrong-research" project -- "prove" the holocaust didn't happen, "prove"
we didn't go to the moon, "prove" there was no slavery in the US, etc.,
not sure that ever happened, however.
Oddly, for a skeptic of computers in the classroom, I owe my later
schooling to a computer. I'm dyslexic and ADD, without a computer, I'm
functionally illiterate, I can not write by hand. The first time I
turned a paper in I wrote on a computer word processor (in 1983), I was
the first student to do so in my class -- and I nearly got expelled from
school for it, as it was so much better than anything I had ever written
before, it couldn't have been mine. Fortunately, my teacher had enough
faith in my intelegence that she didn't believe I'd ever cheat in a way
that she would catch, and believed me when I told her it was all my
work. However, I look at things now, over 20 years later...and I'd
still probably have the exact same problems in school I had then...the
answer would be sitting all around me, but it wouldn't be available to
help me in the ways I needed help. Twenty and twenty-five years ago,
everyone "knew" computers belonged in a classroom, but no one knew what
to do with them. Today...people still don't know what to do with
them...and they are sucking up huge amounts of education funding.
Anyway..much more I could write on this topic...it is very dear to me,
but I'm way overdue for bed. |-)
oh, btw: well written article, Saad. :)
Nick.