The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Elsewhere, students report of friends who claim to have run popular modern games like World of Warcraft (WoW) and Defence of the Ancients (DOTA) on the school-supplied equipment. It is hard to imagine the experience on such diminutive hardware is totally fulfilling but it does point to further activities that our young scholars can engage in instead of the expected reading, writing and arithmetic.
Overwhelmingly, the most common request for “hacks” are for online chat, such as one eloquent poster who wrote, “omg can any tell me how to access msn using school laptops? The version of my is Lenovo ideapad s10.”
Elsewhere, in possibly a modern-day application of the fabled absentee note that says “Please excuse Jimmy from school, signed My Dad” we read, “Hey can u let me know how i can open my sons laptop to use msn at home please ... I wud appreciate it ...”
Besides the aforementioned .exe bypass, students have pointed each other to free proxy service phproxy.org and claims exist this has successfully resulted in unfettered banter between classmates.
Not all have opted to pursue workarounds to the limitations placed on them which causes problems of its own. One poster laments “my parents specifically chose not to purchase my sister a laptop as she was receiving one ... the issue here is that the one family PC is still fought over in recreational time so my sister can get access to MySpace and MSN Messenger and Facebook.”
In addition to student mischief, other problems have come to light with the DET netbooks. Students complain that educational sites on American Indians have been blocked. More than one forum poster notes their classroom lessons have been delayed when teachers (who have less online restrictions) direct the class to a Wikipedia page only to discover the pupils do not have access to it.
Personally, I welcome anything that improves the quality of education. I’m not surprised that young people would tinker with their laptops (and that in itself could even be an educational outcome.)
However, to learn of high school classes becoming virtual playgrounds with students playing games right in front of their teacher, or to see lesson time wasted because teachers can’t direct the students to appropriate web sites makes me question the value and the cost.
Perhaps it’s time to close the netbooks and bring back pen and paper, during lessons, at least.
Addendum: within an hour of posting this story online hits have begun coming in from search engines with queries like "how to hack DET laptop", "get MSN working on DET laptop", "MSN on school laptops" and more.
David Bass
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