Mark Lyn­der­say

In one of the bold­est sweeps of their man­i­festo, the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship an­nounced that: "Every child go­ing on to sec­ondary school from the SEA will be pro­vid­ed with a lap­top to be­gin their sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion."

As par­ty promis­es go, this one was clear-cut. Sens­ing low hang­ing, if some­what ex­pen­sive fruit, the par­ty com­ing in­to pow­er im­me­di­ate­ly an­nounced that it would be im­ple­ment­ing this project for the com­ing school year. The thing with such tempt­ing fruit, though, is that they are a great temp­ta­tion to com­pet­ing in­ter­ests, and, if un­picked, swift­ly go over­ripe or fall prey to preda­tors.

The Gov­ern­ment may rest as­sured that its nat­ur­al preda­tors, the PNM in Op­po­si­tion, will be mark­ing each stage of this project as it moves to­ward im­ple­men­ta­tion and be­yond and will be swift to point to any in­di­ca­tion of its fail­ure. It should not be nec­es­sary to have par­ty af­fil­i­a­tions to wish this project every suc­cess. The mod­erni­sa­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go's ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and the em­brace of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy in that process should be en­dorsed by any right think­ing cit­i­zen keen to raise the learn­ing po­ten­tial of our chil­dren in school.

That said, plunk­ing down thou­sands of portable com­put­ers in­to a school sys­tem quite clear­ly un­pre­pared for them is un­like­ly to achieve the de­sired re­sult im­me­di­ate­ly and even the most hope­ful sup­port­ers of the project should be will­ing to ac­knowl­edge the pos­si­bil­i­ty, and I note this with the great­est of re­straint, of "hic­cups."

The lap­top ini­tia­tive has the po­ten­tial to be­come the bomb­shell move that the UNC last dropped when they re­moved VAT and du­ty on com­put­ers dur­ing their last run in gov­er­nance, a de­ci­sion that prompt­ed an ex­plo­sion in the num­bers of com­put­ers be­ing im­port­ed in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

What hap­pens when lap­tops land in schools in which on­ly the newest, youngest stu­dents have pos­ses­sion of them? Will they prompt a new kind of tech­nol­o­gy dri­ven haz­ing? What will teach­ers, some of whom are bare­ly hold­ing their own do­ing chalk and talk in the face of poor sup­port sys­tems, make of a whole new di­men­sion to their teach­ing ex­pe­ri­ence and the chal­lenges of mak­ing use of new tech­nol­o­gy wield­ed by a fresh young stu­dent body?

What hap­pens when a school sys­tem al­ready adept at cre­at­ing porn on cell­phones has ac­cess to even mod­er­ate­ly pow­ered com­put­ers? The suc­cess­ful chil­dren of SEA 2010 will not be the on­ly ones giv­en a lap­top. In some cas­es, this will be the first com­put­er in a house­hold. What will those fam­i­lies do with this new op­por­tu­ni­ty and how will they lever­age it to their ad­van­tage?

Re­port­ing on his ex­pe­ri­ence with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion's In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy de­part­ment, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Tim Gopeesingh said that: "There is fil­i­bus­ter­ing, there is in­co­her­ence, there is a slap­dash ap­proach to it. What do I do?"

I can't of­fer any ad­vice on that one, but these are some things that need to be done.

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry must cre­ate a sim­ple, one page or­der of con­duct for the use of the new lap­tops in the school sys­tem.

Teach­ers must be coached on how the im­ple­men­ta­tion will be han­dled on school premis­es and of­fered guid­ance on how these new tools might be in­te­grat­ed in­to the as­sign­ments of the first-year cur­ricu­lum. Stu­dents should be coached on the val­ue of form­ing peer groups to share in­for­ma­tion and earned un­der­stand­ing of these new com­put­ing tools.

Lo­cal de­vel­op­ers should be en­cour­aged to cre­ate soft­ware and learn­ing Web sites aligned with ed­u­ca­tion re­quire­ments to lever­age the val­ue of what are, in the end, just lit­tle tech­nol­o­gy box­es.

This is a crit­i­cal mo­ment for the new Gov­ern­ment, and the way this project is han­dled will not on­ly be im­por­tant to them po­lit­i­cal­ly, it will al­so change the lives of thou­sands of chil­dren at a crit­i­cal point in their learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. Read more on this at http://lyn­der­say­dig­i­tal.com/bd/10.html