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$37m buys experiment in Maine schools

Reports from the nation’s retailers suggest that the usual surge of back-to-school buying is rather muted this year. People just aren’t buying as many pencil pouches and protractors as they used to, not to mention computers.

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist

Just as well for Apple Computer Inc. that the State of Maine is about to hand out 16,000 brand new iBook laptops to every public school seventh-grader in the state. Next year, Maine will pick up 20,000 more, for use by seventh- and eighth-graders. Each laptop will include wireless networking, allowing students to easily connect to each other and to the Internet.

It’s all part of a $37 million plan to make Maine school children the most wired in America. And while it will help Apple’s quarterly earnings report, it’s far from certain that the program will result in better-educated students.

Maine is plunging into an educational debate that is at least as old as television. Older readers will remember when television sets appeared in our classrooms, placed there by educators convinced that educational television shows would turn us into little Einsteins. It didn’t quite work that way, and there are plenty of critics who say that throwing computers at students will be equally fruitless.

Clifford Stoll teaches physics part time at a California high school and spends the rest of his time as a stay-at-home dad. He used to teach astrophysics at the University of California at Berkeley, but now lives off royalties from three successful books, including ”High Tech Heretic,” a skeptical take on computers in the classroom.

”What research do you expect a seventh- or eighth-grader to do, for which the Internet is essential?” Stoll asked. In his view, the Internet is an excellent resource for quickly looking up facts, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with it. ”The reason for asking questions is to inspire research, not to get answers,” Stoll said. ”The reason is to get somebody to be curious. If you want to destroy curiosity, the best possible way is to douse it with a firehose of answers.”

In Stoll’s view, Web sites serve up a glib and superficial collection of facts, leaving students with the illusion that they understand a topic. The kind of deep knowledge they would get by reading books on the subject and haunting the stacks of the local library just isn’t available through a wireless laptop.

Also missing, Stoll says, is the interaction with an inspiring, demanding, human instructor.

”The more time you have with your nose pressed to a CRT or an LCD,” he said, ”the less time you have with a teacher.”

Even the Maine laptop program’s biggest booster, Governor Angus King, admits that it’s not a sure thing, citing scholarly studies of computers in classrooms.

”There are some that indicate that it’s positive, and there are some that indicate it’s sort of neutral,” King said.

He added that he has seen no evidence that classroom computers do any harm, so if the program is a flop, ”the worst that happens is that our schools have 36,000 new computers that’ll be useful for the next five or six years.”

Still, King said he is confident that the Maine program will get it right, partly because of a million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to train the teachers who will lead these digital classrooms.

”It isn’t going to work if you just hand out the devices,” the governor said. Training is ”an absolutely critical part of the project,” especially since some teachers didn’t know how to use computers or the Internet, while others didn’t know where to find educational materials on line.

Today, each school has a technology team leader with special training in computer-aided education. Those teachers can turn to a nine-person team of mentors for additional help.

King also points to the results of a pilot study conducted last year. At the Pembroke School, 22 seventh- and eighth-graders were given laptops last year.

”I saw dramatic, dramatic behavior [and] attendance improvement,” said principal Paula Smith. Students stopped cutting classes and coming to school late. It was as if having a $1,200 computer of their own gave students a new sense of personal responsibility.

There’s no hard data on whether the Pembroke students actually learned more. King admits that the students’ improved behavior might not last.

”That may be just the novelty of it,” he said, ”and maybe that will wear off.”

In other words, we don’t know whether Maine would have been better off spending its $37 million on hiring more teachers or buying more library books. And we won’t find out for at least a couple of years. Which means that Maine’s children aren’t the only ones being taken to school this week.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected].

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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