This make sense to me, not because laptop programs are a bad idea (says the guy who is rolling one out at his school), but because these programs have been sold as a way to raise student achievement as measured by SATs and other standardized tests.  It’s fairly easy to show that laptop programs don’t raise scores. In fact, it’s pretty easy to show that almost anything schools try don’t raise scores (the main exception being studying to the test — that has been shown to make a difference).

The best way to raise "student achievement" (other than studying for the test) is to admit better test takers.

In general:

1. People who advocate for laptop programs should be more careful about what they claim.
2. In general, schools engage in a lot of magical and/or sloppy thinking.   They are embarrassingly susceptible to snake oil peddlers.  
3. Laptop programs are expensive. It’s good that they are receiving scrutiny. It’s also good to hold people who make claims accountable.

So what are my claims?  I think young people (and most especially girls) would benefit from learning to comfortably use (and take care of) a portable computer.   I believe it’ll foster the confidence they’ll need to explore future technologies, some of which will be different than anything we can now imagine. 

I would like to measure the benefit I claim, but it isn’t easy.  Assessment that misses the mark is worse than no assessment at all.

It’s crazy how much better my networking experience is at home than it is here on the campus where I work.   It’s that way for a lot of people now.   Of course, it used to be quite the opposite.  You were stuck with dial-up at home and would head into the office (or onto campus) in order to gain access to a broadband connection.   These days, the bandwidth available to you at home can be equal to or greater than the bandwidth available to your entire company or school, and of course you have to share it with all your colleagues at work.  So now people go home to get more done.   That seems nuts, but it would be expensive to provide 100 people at the office the same amount of bandwidth they have at home — or so it seems.

Maybe I should have started with this question: Do the people working in an office or sharing a campus need all that bandwidth?   Of course they do.  Everybody needs bandwidth now.   More and more, the resources that matter to people, no matter what they are doing, are out there, in the cloud.   Fewer resources are inside their computers, on a CD-ROM, or on the servers maintained by the local IT staff.

I am the local IT staff and I don’t use the stuff we provide as much.  For example, I keep most of my documents at docs.google.com now.   That means

1. I don’t use the copy of Office purchased for my computer.
2. I don’t use the fileserver around the corner in our climate-controlled server room
3. I need more bandwidth

Similarly, we (the IT folk) have started using a wiki at wikispaces.com for our internal documentation.  Once again:

1. I don’t use the copy of Macromedia Contribute purchased for my computer
2. I don’t use the intranet web server around the corner
3. I need more bandwidth

Now, relative to most of the people I work with (and even many of the students who attend here), I’m an early adopter.  But even those who only use Word, Internet Explorer (or Safari), and Outlook (or Entourage) and store everything they produce on the local fileserver are spending a lot more time on the net reading web sites and watching video stored on web sites..  Of couse our students are spending a lot of time at MySpace and Facebook, and downloading everything that isn’t nailed down.

The fact is that people don’t rely on their local network to the extent they used to.  If they still do, it’s probably because they "grew up" doing so and have no particular reason to change.  

So, should I be shifting IT dollars that I traditionally spend on copies of Microsoft Office and on servers and spend it on bandwidth and on services provided by other people’s servers (out there in the cloud)?   Does the IT mission shrink back to what it was long ago — providing access to specialized applications and private data — with the additional responsibility of providing a fast connection to the cloud, where they can find the rest of what they are looking for.

I guess I’m talking about a form of outsourcing, but not the kind where somebody on the inside is replaced by somebody on the outside, at least not directly.  The Web cloud now provides many of the things you used to have to go to your corporate network for, and we’re only at the beginning of the shift.  

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His recent entry on the Israeli-Palistinian conflict is worth reading.

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On a related note, when I’m emailed a document (usually a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet) to add to the intranet at work, I just email it to docs.google.com (formerly writely.com) where it is automatically converted to HTML, visit docs.google.com, touch it up a bit (I like a little color), publish it, and link it up somewhere on the intranet.   True, I could have used Office’s "save as web page" function, but I can’t stand the HTML it generates and I have to locate the generated file(s) where our intranet server can see it.   Once the file is up on docs.google.com, I can share it with the author of the document and try to coax him or her to use the docs.google.com version instead of the original Office file as the source, but, I don’t usually succeed for reasons good and bad.  When I succeed, she or he can publish updates directly.   Immediate turnaround for the author and no work for me.

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The first person I heard make a direct comparison between fat and race was Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point and Blink. At an event in London, a member of the audience asked him what subjects he thought were hot. Gladwell, off the top of his head, wondered aloud whether fat wasn’t the new race.

I was alerted to this article by Google alerts.   I’m a big Malcolm Gladwell fan, so I’ve asked Google to send me links, once a week, of web articles that reference him.   I’m also subscribed to Gladwell’s blog and read his stuff in the New Yorker.

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The water is shallow, maybe a foot deep. The water in the ditch has a current. When you look down in the water the first thing you notice is long strands of seaweed stretched out and waving in the current. After that, depending on where you are looking, you might notice some trash caught in the current or you might notice the fish. There are lots of fish swimming in the shallow water, They all look pretty similar, varying mostly in size. Some look pretty big; I don’t know, as a vegetarian, I don’t often find myself nose to nose with a fish. Here’s the thing is about these fish: they are all swimming upstream and none of them is making any progress. What are they thinking? Also, if I were a bird, I’d be making my living along Via Del Fosso. Even I could catch these fish. Maybe they taste just awful, even to a bird. Italy is a great mystery.

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At any rate, I’m reading a lot — must be on vacation.   I just finished a mystery by Patricia Cornwell called Trace.   Hero medical examiner, creepy serial killer.  If I’m to believe the jacket, Cornwell is a hotshot mystery writer.  It was a page-turner, but not all that good. The book was left in the apartment by a previous guest, apparently.  There’s a shelf of books.  Good thing, considering how much reading we’re doing, especially Mrs. W., who spends less time walking around town.  I walk often, although sometimes I read during rest stops.

Oh, I think it’s the Italian national anthem.  Game… imminent.   Hard to believe that the Italians would have an atonal national anthem , but all I can hear is an organ droning on tunelessly.  I guess the stadium is too boomy.  Now, it’s the Ukrainian national anthem.  Same problem.  I guess the acoustics suck.

The coin toss.  Game… imminent.

Game on!  The Ukrainians have VERY yellow uniforms.

The Italians score early!   Horns blare!  The neighbors shout!  Mrs. W., sitting in another room studying Italian, is concerned.  She doesn’t understand.

The Italian team looks a lot stronger; they’ve had a few good chances and it’s still pretty early in the first half.  Oh dear, the crowd is doing the wave — that’s so "When Harry met Sally".

An Italian player comes to the sidelines, injured.  I think he got hit in il capo, if I understood the announcer correctly (wouldn’t that be something?).  I think il capo is just below il cap.

Now an Italian player is being carried off on a stretcher.  Never mind, he refuses the stretcher!   Maybe the Ukrainians are waging a war of attrition.  They look bigger and stronger, and they just had their first scoring chance — a header in front of the net, though it wasn’t even close.

I’ve watched three games or so now and here’s a thing is:  the players foul each other a lot.  They grab; they push.  When they’re caught, they whine.  One of the Ukrainians was just whining.  I think the refs for this match are Belgian.  What language did he use?

Halftime!   Mrs W. slipped in late in the half and is playing a few hands of Yukon.   Playing Yukon is something we do while on vacation and at virtually no other time.   Yukon is related to Klondike, which is the game many people think of as Solitaire, but Yukon is much more winnable.  Skill also matters more, and although I shouldn’t brag, I’m so practiced that I won 7 or 8 games in a row at one point during this trip.  Before you accuse me, I shuffled the deck thoroughly between games, at least I meant to.  Besides, Mrs. W. and I played gin with the same cards in the middle of that winning streak; you’d think that would organize the deck differently (in the absence of good shuffling).   In all the years I’ve been playing Yukon, I’d never had a winning streak of more than 3 that I can remember.

Second half looks like first half: the Italians just had a scoring chance, then lost a player to injury.   

Oo!  The Ukrainians just had one go right through the goal mouth.  And another great chance, a header directed at the corner of the net and stopped by the goalie.  Of course, the Italian goalie is now injured.  He banged his head on the goalpost.   I guess he’ll be okay.  Ukraine is still putting pressure on; they look much more competitive this half.  They just had two dead-on shots, but instead of tying the game, they let Italy charge down the field and put in a header!  2-0.  The neighbors cheer again!

Match is probably over with 30 minutes plus a little left to play, although Ukraine just hit the crossbar with a very hard kick.

Okay, it’s over.  Italy just scored another goal, a very pretty one: a charge from the side, a centering pass, and a tap in.  There’s only 20 or 25 minutes left and the Ukrainians look down in the mouth.  It would be hard for them to look any other way.  The hole is too deep.  I think the Italians are emptying the bench, although I seem to recall that there is a limit to how many substitutions a team can make during the game.

Well, this entry, which promised to be both long and boring, has more than reached its potential.  Final: 3-0 Italia!  Now there will be lots of crazy fans racing their motorcycles or cars around town, trailing Italian flags, and honking.  Better warn Mrs. W.

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