Dateline: 03/19/97 - by Walter H. Horowitz, Vice President, NoteSys, Inc.
Americans like to think that we lead
the world in all aspects of technology. If you take the materials available on the web as
an indication, the real leader is Australia. I have found more Australian schools talking
about their achievements with laptop saturation projects than anywhere else in the world.
Schools with programs include:
The Expanding Horizons Online conference, held September 1996 in Australia was sponsored by Microsoft and Toshiba. Many of the papers presented at the conference are available at their site for downloading.
For background on the plan for computers in Australia, see "Computers in Schools - a framework for development", a discussion paper from the Australian Computer Society and the Australian Council for Computers in Education from April, 1995.
An evaluation of the success of their projects can be found in "Computer Saturated Learning Environments" by Paul Newhouse of Edith Cowan University, a paper presented Sept. 96 at the Learning Environment Technology Australia 96 conference.
One of the few public mailing list devoted specifically to the use of laptop comptuers in schools is run by SNAP, the Student Notebook Access Plan. Snap is a partnership between Toshiba, Australian Schools, and resellers created to promote the use of laptop computers in education.
