Life just ain't fair for poor kids

By Peter Vogel

Sometimes an unexpected posting to a public forum gives you pause to reflect on the riches you already have. Like all ICT (information and communications technology) teachers, I'd like nothing better than to have the latest and greatest gear installed and ready to go each September.

A classroom full of Alienware Aurora 7500s or Falcon Northwest Mach 5s with, say, water-cooled quad core processors and three nVidia 8800 Ultra graphics cards would be nice, but it's not going to happen.

That's just not realistic, and in fact it isn't even practical.

I'm fortunate to be in a school where my principal, and by extension the school board, has always been supportive of new hardware and software initiatives. However, rather than always buying brand new gear we have had great success with ex-lease equipment that might be anywhere from two to six years old. In recent years we've tried to go after gear that is no more than three years old.

Amazingly, several of the companies that specialize in repackaging such ex-lease gear for schools give their equipment a three-year warranty! That's two years more than on the gear when it was new!

Let's get back to that pause for reflection for a moment.

I was searching for some system requirements for a novel computer programming language called Scratch, developed at MIT and released to the public in May 2007. I've been experimenting with Scratch and similar languages for a while.

While looking through the public forum scratch.mit.edu/forums dealing with hardware requirements I ran across the following posting, a reply to someone who asked whether the language could run on machines capable of generating only 800x600 video resolution. The reply sarcastically and rhetorically asked, "Who still uses 800x600? Is this 1995?" After the text of the reply the poster had added a Scratch icon for sound control constructed to look like "Play Sound with canned laughter."

Laugh as hard as you can, buddy, but I'm from Penang, Malaysia, a third-world country, and I'm in this to assist a Catholic charitable organization which runs an after-school program for children from the urban slum area, which is highly infested with crime, drugs, prostitution, murders, family abuses, and all types of vices.

Naturally we can't afford much. We got all our computers from those who were throwing them away (yes, there are rich people in Penang too). I had to practically rebuild those computers from scratch (no pun intended), disassembling them, testing all the parts, then re-assembling the usable parts into working computers.

Even the hard disks are old; if you can imagine it, we are still using 4GB to 10GB hard disks, circa 1995 or so. I am installing Scratch in the computers so that kids here can at least get a chance to learn. It just ain't fair when children from wealthy families get fancy toys, like 2000 USD laptops, for their birthdays, while kids in the slum areas don't even get enough to eat.

As I said, laugh as hard as you want, buddy, for the kids here are too hungry to laugh.

Happy New Year!

Here in B.C. the technology divide is much less apparent. A certain fraction of school funding is designated for technology. Whether that fraction is adequate is a debate for another day. Nearly all schools in B.C. have access to

Five-year-old computer equipment still useful

high-speed Internet service. The provincial government is moving to a common school administration technology platform. A consortium of school districts has been formed to negotiate bulk software licensing prices.

Much of the "extra" technology in schools is acquired through parent group initiatives, and in some cases through grants from local and provincial casino-profit-sharing plans.

Information technology equipment is expensive, no doubt about it. Furthermore, it depreciates at about 30 per cent per year, which, of course, is why a school market for gear older than three years has emerged. In the commercial sector leased equipment tends to be replaced every three years. In my experience such gear, especially if it carries a warranty to schools, remains highly viable for another three years, even if its book value to the original purchaser has dropped to zero.

Equipment more than, say, five years old is still useful in many less-demanding applications. That's where the highly successful Computers for Schools consortium www.cfsbc.ca comes in. It has donated, or made available at a nominal cost, almost 100,000 computers to B.C. schools and libraries since 1994.

As I noted earlier, if you visit my school you won't find the latest quad-core computer desktops equipped with nVidia 8800-series graphic cards and variable aspect ratio LCD screens. You will find a spectrum of computer gear, most at the three-year-old level, about one-third purchased new, the remainder purchased through off-lease specialist companies or from CfSBC, and about one-quarter being replaced each year.

Those are our "riches." I hope we are good stewards in using what we have.

Suggestions and comments about this column may be sent to peterv@portal.ca.