25,000 laptops for students in Terengganu

I had a chuckle when I first read this newspaper report. Apparently the Terengganu state government wants to give out 25,000 laptops to Primary 5 students to replace their heavy textbooks. This is another example of a policy decision that was poorly conceived and will probably be poorly implemented as well.

I think that the idea of giving away free laptops to students is a bad idea in principle especially if they are conventional laptops. (I'm a little bit more agnostic about the 100 dollar laptops which are being promoted by OLPC) I think it diverts attention from other bigger problems which kids in rural and poorer schools face which is the lack of resources, poor infrastructure and poor teaching. There is no guarantee that having a laptop will improve the quality of teaching or learning or if it will help in reducing the digital divide between kids in urban and rural schools.

But this specific idea in Terengganu seems even more ill-conceived. For example, these laptops are supposed to replace the heavy textbooks which these students are now carrying around. But there is no guarantee that the 'format' in which these textbooks appear in soft copy will be conducive for learning or teaching. One reason why books have not gone extinct despite the increasing prevalence of PCs is that the PC screen is not conducive for reading. Granted, Primary 5 or 6 textbooks are not novels but I think some of the same principles apply. You cannot just transfer a textbook wholesale from hard copy to soft copy. There needs to be quite a bit of customization in terms of interface and graphics and user friendliness before this can be done. Frankly, I don't trust that the Terengganu government has done their due diligence and confirmed that the DBP has the capability to do this for ALL their textbooks.

Furthermore, I wonder if these guys have thought about how these kids are going to recharge the laptop batteries. Unless these laptops can be 'handcranked' (some versions of the 100 dollar laptops I've seen on TV are recharged in this way), I can easily forsee a situation when kids are queuing up behind limited 'pluck points' to get their laptops charged in between periods.

What about when these laptops start acting up? Or require fixing or repairing? Will the state education department also come up with the funds to do this? I can easily forsee a situation whereby these laptops breakdown for a variety of reasons and teachers are finding a queue of students who want their laptops to be repaired.

To make matters worse, the state Education, Higher Education, Human Resource, Science and Technology committee chairman Ahmad Razif Abdul Rahman wants to set up a factory with Intel in Terengganu to start producing laptops and expect to produce 10,000 units a month. Now, I'm a bit disconnected with the corporate world but if I'm not mistaken, Intel produces processor chips and not laptops. So unless this is part of the larger One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which Intel has signed up for, who is going to produce these laptops? Surely not Intel. Is the Terengganu state government going to own and manage this company or factory?

The same exco chairman predicts that in 3 or 4 years, all the kids in primary school in Terengganu will be using laptops instead of textbooks.

Here's my prediction. The laptops won't be given out in April because of technical delays. The DBP has not gotten the materials ready yet. The laptops are given out in July instead (or maybe August or September or later). Teachers are finding that they cannot teach their students because the batteries on the laptops run out after 2 hours and there are not enough power sockets in the schools to recharge these laptops in a timely fashion. Laptops start breaking down after 3 months. The teachers get frustrated and call for the students to go back to using textbooks. 6 months to 1 year after the laptops are given out, the state government abandons its plan and goes back to the drawing board citing technical difficulties. The cost to the taxpayer? RM30 to RM50 million.