Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams one of the key strategic initiatives underway at present is Kevin Rudd's Digital Education Revolution (DER). In essence this plan involves providing all teenage school students with a netbook computer. Over time elements of the curriculum will hook into the equipment transforming the education experience. I'm no expert in this field but even I can see the potential here so in one sense hats off to Kevin and Julia for the program. More about that later.
A few years ago I gave a hand me down PC to my Mum as she showed interest in getting on the internet. Despite my Mum attending a few computer courses she's still a technophobe at heart meaning that the PC is effectively used for solitaire, skype, e-mail and a little bit of internet. As we now live 9,000 miles apart Skype Video has become by far the most important of these applications.
A few months ago she got a virus ultimately requireing a complete PC reinstall, a new ISP software CD, etc. Long story short is that the outage lasted about 3 weeks and was only fixed by using the services of a PC repair man.
Now back to the DER. Here in NSW some 500 Technical Support Officers (TSO's) - effectively glorified PC repair men - have been hired to support the program. Maybe it would have been better just to pick a better device than an underpowered PC running windows that wouldn't crash so much - say an iPad or a Google Tablet running Chrome perhaps?
Speaking of which, when Steve gets round to putting a front camera in the iPad I figure it'll be just the deveice for my technophobic Mum.
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