The Argus Leader is right on one thing: the spat over the funding of the governor's laptop initiative has distracted from the merits of the program itself. The Argus Leader is dead wrong on another thing: laptops do not have educational value.
Giving high school students access to laptop computers can be rewarding, especially for those who wouldn't otherwise have much access to computers. We all joke about how much more tech savvy our kids are, and there is much truth in that. But it also means that those children who don't have that level of familiarity with our digital world risk falling far behind.
Except we have research on this, and laptop programs do little to bridge the "digital divide." Further, if the worry is that some students don't have computer knowledge, there is an easy way to combat that ignorance: have them take a computer class. Like cavemen, the Argus is awed by the shiny object of the laptop.
I wrote about this issue at length yesterday, so there is no reason to repeat myself. Laptop programs for schools have no significant influence on the attainment of knowledge, and as such they are a waste of public dollars.
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