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The power of free…
August 14, 2008 | | 1 Comment
In his documentary “Bowling for Columbine”, Michael Moore visited a bank where clients received a gun for opening an account. Today a courier brought me my free gift from my bank for opening an account, something far more powerful – a micro-laptop.
The Royal Bank here in Canada is offering new and existing clients who have certain types of accounts and direct deposit their paychecks into that account a free ASUS Eee PC computer. What is the message here?
One of the messages I am giving to educators today is that the cost of computing is heading towards $0, while the power of computing is going through the roof. With cellular providers giving phones away, ISP’s giving away desktops and now banks jumping on the bandwagon, just how long can our school systems continue to cry poor.
The world is flatter and access is becoming less and less costly. As phone, television and computing services continue to converge, just how long can we continue to support industrial age schooling.
Back to my new Eee PC, it’s kind of cool. The keyboard is small and takes a bit of getting use to, but it is small and lightweight (great for travelling), the opensource OS is easy to navigate and the applications (Firefox, Openoffice, etc.) provide me with a great basic basic interface to the world. In fact, this post is typed on my new – and free – laptop.
If banks can give these away, what excuse do our schools have?
tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, ASUS, EeePC
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Interesting thought… I know of a few school districts, especially in Northern Ontario, where all students have laptops. And they’re MacBooks. And it’s not just a pilot project, they’ve been doing this for years.
Anyways, we tried out the Eee PC here and found pretty much the same things as you did… Very small and totally not as functional as our 17″ MacBooks but super sweet when heading somewhere where you don’t want to carry around a massive laptop.
Glad you enjoy your free laptop!! Cheers!
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