Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Article is Out

Not really makin a huge splash, but for what it is worth look for the spring 2007 edition of the Python Papers. See pages 8 and following.

In an email Duke Crawford offers the following links to an open source language drill program:

http://www.olpcnews.com/content/ \
localization/learning_language.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/twexter
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WiXi
http://wixi.cc/hello_world
http://twext.cc/go/18

Is anybody else out there?

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Laptop backlash

Get it while it's live: the NY Times reports “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops”.

Responses here.

a snippet:

==>
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has
decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of
other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing
programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and
worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a
technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between
students who had computers at home and those who did not.

"After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact
on student achievement — none," said Mark Lawson, the school board
president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York
State to experiment with putting technology directly into students'
hands. "The teachers were telling us when there's a one-to-one
relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the
way. It's a distraction to the educational process."
<==

It's not surprising, really, but the timing is not good.

FInal Version of Article

The 3rd instance of the Python Papers will be coming out May 28.