Papyrus News

I observed some schools a week ago that were using Asus EEE PCs in the classroom.  At least from initial observations and interviews, it appears that these low-cost bring substantially the same benefits as higher-cost laptops, though at a greatly reduced price.  See my first-hand report over at OLPC News.

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Campbell’s Law, put forth in 1976 by Donald Campbell, prominent American social scientist and president of the American Psychological Association

As reported on Liliputing, NorhTec is launching a Gecko EduBook (PDF link) netbook with some fascinating features.  First, it uses a low power 1GHz Xcore86 CPU that uses just 1.2 watts of power.  On the one hand, this is a pretty low-power machine (in comparision, the Asus 901 Eee PC used n some school districts uses a 1.66 GHz processor), which will limit its capacity, but also allows many other interesting innovations.

For example, it can run on  AA batteries rather than more expensive lithium batteries.  It doesn’t require a fan, which brings down the power usage and weight.  Since the power supply is internal, you don’t need a real power adaptor, just a $2 cord to plug it in.   It’s also entirely module, allowing you to easily swap out the CPU and RAM and other components.  It comes default with Linux but can supposedly run Windows XP (if anybody is silly enough to want to run Windows on a low-power machine like this.)  NorhTec says the base models will cost as little as $200.

I expect that within three years, there will be an impressive range of sub $250 netbooks suitable for schools (with a number of models in the $150-$200 range), and financial obstacles toward integration of computers in U.S. schools will be much more easily overcome than today.

A high school student at the Science Learning Academy posts his video perspective on technology in schools.

“I’m a big believer in open source, which is an ancient African phrase meaning ‘no, I will not fix your Windows computer for you.’”
Ivan Krstić

A little piece on MLA citation and the decreasing amount of print resources.

How to reach a real live human being at 1000 or so companies.

Discussions about online technologies seems to linger (in my memory) around what’s bad about technology: Flaming, cyberbullying, and the loss of the human connection. All of these are valid arguments, but it’s lovely to come across a news item that points out the good news, such as this BBC News story about an American teenager who saved a British teenager’s life after chatting with him on Facebook.

Here’s a great New York Times article on netbooks.  Excellent discussion of the coming new generation with ARM chips and Linux replacing Intel chips and Windows, with a tiny hint of the significance of this for education.

"Clock," Darren Hester, Flickr.com

I’ve been noticing a trend over the last few months. This trend has also correlated with my increasing use of the Internet. As people become more dependent on online technologies, they are also rebelling against what could become an addiction for many. It’s not enough to simply put your computer to sleep, because you will need that computer to do your work. You may need something that literally shuts off the distractions – email, Twitter, Facebook, and so on – for you.

In today’s Salon.com, Rebecca Traister writes:

Look, I am not proud. But I bet I am not alone in my near frantic desire to be released — for very brief periods, always with an escape hatch — from the tyranny of my own wandering attention. I may not have known it, but for some time, I have wanted something forceful, computerized and beyond the realms of my own self-determination to come and muffle the beeping, buzzing, ringing, flashing distractions of our technological age so I can get some goddamn work done.

Two programs shut off email and networking for you. The first, Freedom, is a one-year-old program you can download (sorry, Macs only) that will shut off your online access for anywhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours. The other program is a Google Lab called “Email Addict” that will allow you to choose to freeze your browser screen for 15 minutes so that you can no longer write any emails for that period of time. 

This makes me wonder if we’ve reached a point of saturation in our dash to become a digital society. At what point are we becoming too distracted by technologies that were once time-savers?

UPDATE: I tried Freedom a few times over the last few days, while working on a paper for class (I didn’t want to be distracted by emails and browsing). It worked beautifully, and I’m a new convert to this charming new piece of software.