Digital Delights

This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. I led professional development in the world’s first two laptop schools 22 years ago, and in the intervening years I’ve helped schools across the globe go one-to-one, most recently a Korean international school where every K–12 student has a laptop. From the beginning, one-to-one computing wasn’t about arithmetic—it was about stance. The pioneering schools recognized that traditional approaches were failing to amplify children’s potential. Personal computing was a provocation. It placed unprece­dented agency in the lap of the learner and tore down hierarchical school structures that had been in place since the Middle Ages. The laptop embodied a school’s commitment to realizing the dreams of John Dewey, Seymour Papert, and John Holt: to embrace learning-by-doing anytime, anyplace, unencumbered by the traditional curriculum or bell schedule. Giving laptops to children at a time when few executives had one was a statement that things need not be as they always have been.