Failures of the laptop giveaway

These preparatory activities such as the clarification of the goals and objectives of the project, teacher preparation, student preparation and proper supervisory resources were all neglected because they were not photogenic.

For a long time after the laptops were distributed, and even today, many of those involved were unsure of the purpose of laptops in schools.

From my research, personal laptops should be used by students to facilitate learnings in the various aspects of the school curriculum. Laptops are not given to students to teach them information technology, or computer operations; such instruction can be best provided in computer laboratories.

We should recognise that the use of laptops for instruction is not limited to surfing the web for information. In order to effectively use laptops as learning tools teachers, principals and supervisors should have been taught how to create learning tasks for students that would exploit the attributes of the laptop to facilitate learning by construction, experimentation and elaboration, followed by critical assessments of the results by the learner and others.

Computer-based learning tasks should be consistent with learning theories such as social learning, constructivist and activity learning theories. Hence simple training in computer operations by technicians would be totally inadequate.

Before receiving laptops, students should have been prepared for ownership by efforts to build resilience against the enticements of negative and destructive information such as found on porn sites and supremacist sites.

They should also understand that not everything on the Internet is true, and they should have been taught how to assess the credibility of the various Internet sources.

They should have received engaging tasks from their teachers in creating simulated environments and in constructing and evaluating solutions to subject-based problems.

It is recognised that the country is now in dire financial straits and we can no longer afford to give away laptops when many of those involved are unsure of the purpose of the technology and when the teachers and supervisors are not adequately trained in the preparation of theory-based learning tasks.

However, we must admit that one spin-off effect of the laptop giveaway was to make many more citizens (not only the students) more computer literate.

David Subran via email