[IAEP] Essay on applying netbooks to high school ("secondary") education, especially STEM

[Ron Feigenblatt]

Having now discovered this mailing list, I will point you at a lengthy
essay I wrote last spring on applying netbooks to high school
("secondary") education, especially STEM ("Science Technology
Engineering Mathematics" - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields ). It was inspired by a USA
federal program deploying netbooks at a rural Georgia high school
sited in the transition zone between exurban Atlanta and Appalachia.

It is the sort of place which, almost incredibly, only recently
"discovered" and started respecting settled federal case law an entire
half-century old, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qaFZwXaY8o . No
doubt when stubborn reactionaries in other USA regions started
screaming about this now-long-ago rollback of unconstitutional
theocracy, the people here were too busy screaming about having to
finally attend public schools with Nigerians - only that wasn't the
word they used.

Defying federal law is an old vice in Haralson County, as illustrated
by a Web page about its history of alcohol production, prepared for a
recent Smithsonian Museum-on-Main-Street exhibit, online at
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gahchs/KeyIngredients/Moonshine.htm

I did not move here until middle age, for the sake of enjoying
isolation from others. Happily, I spent the childhood years of my
minority elsewhere in the USA, where kids learned to take care of
themselves if they wanted to grow up, as illustrated by a
now-forgotten film set there not many years before I came along:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydwARWNMuVI

Find the essay in question at
http://bellsouthpwp.net/d/o/docdtv/Education/HCHSnetbooks/

Ron