desculpem o crosspost.

atenção, acho as críticas importantissimas para podermos pensar em
estruturar uma alternativa de ensino e implantação dessas máquinas horriveis
;-) que acho que o governo vai comprar mesmo assim.

x

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Valdemar Setzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: May 6, 2007 9:53 PM
Subject: Re: Against OLPC
To: Marcio Carneiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Olá, Márcio,


Li sim, também por isso te mandei o link! ;-)


Consegui abrir a pg original do NYT, mencionada no Slashdot cujo link você
enviou, pois sou assinante da versão eletrônica. Vai aí abaixo (tirei as
fotos). SENSACIONAL!!! Confirma o que eu disse em meu artigo contra o OLPC
(em meu site) -- mas eu disse muito mais... Enviei a todos os docentes do
IME. Agradeço-lhe IMENSAMENTE -- preciso muito de ajuda para ficar sabendo
do que se passa por aí e que tem relação com o que escrevo.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, Val.

PS: Estou enviando este por Bcc: para algumas pessoas.

--
Valdemar W. Setzer - Dept. of Computer Science, University of São Paulo
Please REPLY to [EMAIL PROTECTED]  -
http://www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer<http://www.ime.usp.br/%7Evwsetzer>
**ATTENTION! I'm using gmail  - there is no guaranty of full privacy.**
+++++++++++++++++++
De:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

New York Times
Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
By WINNIE 
HU<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/winnie_hu/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: May 4, 2007

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their
school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and
hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security,
a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step
instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning,
when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes
because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of
getting help from teachers.

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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/newyork/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>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."

Liverpool's turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide
continue to bring laptops into the classroom. Federal education officials do
not keep track of how many schools have such programs, but two educational
consultants, Hayes Connection and the Greaves Group, conducted a study of
the nation's 2,500 largest school districts last year and found that a
quarter of the 1,000 respondents already had one-to-one computing, and fully
half expected to by 2011.

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been
abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if
any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased
pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs
after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and
escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often
embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to
leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into
curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released
a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who
used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did
not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban
and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income,
minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Matoaca High School just outside Richmond, Va., began eliminating its
five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had
failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without
laptops. Continuing the program would have cost an additional $1.5 million
for the first year alone, and a survey of district teachers and parents
found that one-fifth of Matoaca students rarely or never used their laptops
for learning. "You have to put your money where you think it's going to give
you the best achievement results," said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.

Everett A. Rea Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Calif., where more than 95
percent of students are Hispanic and come from low-income families, gave
away 30 new laptops to another school in 2005 after a class that was trying
them out switched to new teachers who simply did not do as much with the
technology. Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in
western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002
after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops
than on training teachers to teach with them.

Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest
district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to
each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a
pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops
for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for
repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. "It's
cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it," said Vijay Sonty,
chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent
black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.

Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop
program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student
leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home
privilege.

"I feel like I was ripped off," said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his
son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers
video game. "And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all
over again."

Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made
him "a lot better at typing," as he used it to take notes in class, but not
a better student. "I think it's better to wait and buy one for college," he
said.

More than a decade ago, schools began investing heavily in laptops at the
urging of school boards and parent groups who saw them as the key to the
21st century classroom. Following Maine's lead in 2002, states including
Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Dakota helped buy laptops for thousands of
students through statewide initiatives like "Classrooms for the Future" and
"Freedom to Learn." In New York City, about 6,000 students in 22 middle
schools received laptops in 2005 as part of a $45-million, three-year
program financed with city, state and federal money.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have
motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance
and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic
performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades —
because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money
and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational
Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state
test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in
2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that
high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their
counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have
laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.


Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of
California<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org>at
Irvine and author of "Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless
Classroom" (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that
laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California
and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary,
have since eliminated the laptops.

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like
Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train
teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For
instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who
used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala
and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

"Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation,
creativity, autonomy and independent research," he said. "If the goal is to
get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool.
But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/steven_p_jobs/index.html?inline=nyt-per>of
the future, then laptops are extremely useful."

In Liverpool, a predominantly white school district of nearly 8,000
students, one in four of whom qualify for free or reduced lunches,
administrators initially proposed that every 10th through 12th-grade student
be required to lease a laptop, but decided to make the program voluntary
after parents protested. About half the students immediately signed up; now,
three-quarters have them.

At first, the school set up two tracks of classes — laptop and non-laptop —
that resulted in scheduling conflicts and complaints that those without
laptops had been shut out of advanced classes, though school officials
denied that. In 2005, the school went back to one set of classes, and bought
a pool of 280 laptops for students who were not participating in the lease
program.

Soon, a room that used to be for the yearbook club became an on-site repair
shop for the 80 to 100 machines that broke each month, with a "Laptop Help
Desk" sign taped to the door. The school also repeatedly upgraded its online
security to block access to sites for pornography, games and instant
messaging — which some students said they had used to cheat on tests.

Maureen A. Patterson, the assistant superintendent for instruction, said
that since the laptop program was canceled, she has spoken to more than 30
parents who support the decision and received five phone calls from parents
saying they were concerned that their children would not have technological
advantages. She said the high school would enlarge its pool of shared
laptops for in-class use, invest in other kinds of technology and also
planned to extend building hours in the evening to provide computer access.

In a 10th grade English class the other day, every student except one was
tapping away on a laptop to look up food facts about Wendy's, McDonald's,
and Burger King for a journal entry on where to eat. The one student without
a computer, Taylor Baxter, 16, stared at a classmate's screen because she
had forgotten to bring her own laptop that day.

But in many other classrooms, there was nary a laptop in sight as teachers
read from textbooks and scribbled on chalkboards. Some teachers said they
had felt compelled to teach with laptops in the beginning, but stopped
because they found they were spending so much time coping with technical
glitches that they were unable to finish their lessons.

Alice McCormick, who heads the math department, said most math teachers
preferred graphing calculators, which students can use on the Regents exams,
to laptops, which often do not have mathematical symbols or allow students
to show their work for credit. "Let's face it, math is for the most part
still a paper-and-pencil activity when you're learning it," she said.

In the school library, an 11th-grade history class was working on research
papers. Many carried laptops in their hands or in backpacks even as their
teacher, Tom McCarthy, encouraged them not to overlook books, newspapers and
academic journals.

"The art of thinking is being lost," he said. "Because people can type in a
word and find a source and think that's the be all end all."
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