Another South Dakota School Joins The Dark Side

Yet another school district goes to the dark side:

Riggs High School staff and students continue to get more comfortable with the school’s laptop computer program.

This is the first year for the school to be part of the statewide computer connection program which provides computers to all high school students. Riggs students and staff have been provided tablet computers.

Computer coordinator Phil Rose says the computer staff continues to work out the bugs. He says so far, there has been few problems.

Administrators said last month, they were pleased with the first results from the computer program.

Once again, go here for a summation of the data on laptops in schools showing that at best broad use of laptops in schooling has no effect on education, and perhaps has a slightly negative effect.

In Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln he discusses the new Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield.  The museum attached to the library was intentionally created with a maximization of visual stimuli and a minimum of words.  The brains behind the museum (a former Disney employee) told Ferguson that today's kids have a "dazzling capacity for processing information," especially visual information. The problem with most museums, the Disney guy suggests, is that they haven't caught on that nobody reads any more, thus the museums are too "text driven."  My point in relating this story is that in a video and computer world it is possible that we are becoming very sophisticated in our ability to understand visual information.  It may also be that we no longer know how to use words.  Is this one reason why our politicians struggle to inspire us?  Is it that they lack the facility with words that helps interpret significant events and give them meaning?  And if they had such ability, would the population understand them?  I note again that the average high school graduate today has half the vocabulary of a high school graduate of a couple generations ago.  One fails to see how greater use of laptops helps remedy this problem.  The ubiquity of laptops in schooling perhaps only accelerates the advance of the post-literate society.