On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Ken Kahn wrote:

> I'm very curious what the restrictive setup was that foiled your plans.

They had a lot of rev A iMacs still running Mac OS 8.1 (still now!) and
AtEase.  Netscape 4.08.  A really old version of Java.  No Shockwave, or
Flash.  All the network was filtered by some "SmartProxy" product that
blocked any wsite that could've been construed as interesting.  A lot of
sites the students wanted to see for legitamate research were blocked.

A lot of districts have a very restrictive policy wrt computers, with kids
needing permission from parents to even use the Britannica.com
encyclopedia.  They assume that kids online means kids becoming sex-pot
drugs addicts with a homemade bomb in each hand, I guess.

We had the option of sending in an appeal/application to have the district
to have someone from the distict IT dept install and approve what we
wanted on there, which was Squeak.    If it were easy, we would've asked
for a  better browser, iCab or IE, flash and a newer Java.

In this district, the computers are all controlled on the district level.
There is a computer guy/math teacher but he doesn't have the power to
change anything.  For even him, the recognized computer person for the
school, it took months to get the disctrict to approve the addition of
some small and free software package with no known exploits.  He told us
how we could do it, but it would've been the end of the session before we
could've got the software on the machines.

We had some prety big ideas at first, which we sold to the principal and
community ed director, and they wree excited about it.  But when it came
to actually teaching it, the system was so restricted that about all we
managed to teach them was how to pick out keywords for searching via
google.  I personally think that is an extremely valuable still for anyone
who is wanting to find information, but kids get bored with it when that's
all you do.  We tried making websites in the ancient 4.08 version of
Composer, and that was good for a while.  But with no way to get the
websites off of the computers at the school, they lost enthusiasm when we
had to tell them they couldn't show their friends or family.

They already knew how to word process, so we couldn't even teach them
that.  Aside from AppleWorks, Netscape and the AtEase file browser, the
students didn't have access to any other programs.  Some had a Logo
interpreter in the list of the apps they could use, but since only a third
of them they could, it wasn't something we could teach everyone.

It's sad, really.  They spent a lot of money on those fine computers only
to have them get old and worthless.  I know parents and teachers don't
want their kids looking at porn, but this isn't the way to foster any sort
of technologically-savvy young folk.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "if i don't stay true to live and hate, how do i differentiate
              between chasing cream and chasing dreams"  :: atmosphere