1 Million Laptops for ‘POOR’ Student?? Sure or Not??

Are they so sure that they want to spend the $$ to distribute the laptop to students? Well, I am not against the idea of helping student to own computer, and ultimately expose them to the skills of IT. But is there better way? For example, give a interest free loan instead of giving free?

After giving the computer, are they going to subsidize the Internet access as well? Basically without Internet nowadays, a computer is near to ‘useless’.

So who is going to be the supplier of the laptops? A branded company or local made ‘Cap Ayam’? Pricing wise is it reasonable? Nowadays we can get a netbook with price around RM 1,500. But remember, with a netbook, we need to acknowledge that we can’t do much more than browsing internet, doing word processing and social networking. Is that considered practical for students? For them, they might be keen to expose to more advance technology for example playing 3D games, do some graphic design, play with programming etc. We can’t really use a netbook to achieve that.

The most to worry is, it’s said to have 1 million student gonna benefit. However, who is to ensure that it’s correctly justified? What if they report as 1 million but the underlying fact is only 100k people get the laptops?

Too many question to be asked. Please don’t simply spend our $$. By the way aren’t we just been told that we need to tighten our budget deficit or else we might have to default our sovereign debts in few years time?

Some update on top of the original posting above. Still remember we had the project to provide projector, laptop to schools for teacher to use as part of high tech teaching? What I have known so far is, a lot of the projector are left unused, or at most used for watching videos during school time. Many teachers don’t know how to use computer aid teaching material to teach correctly. The laptops are out of date now and not suitable anymore. However, after spending all the money, what benefit have gain? I do not know. Maybe those in education field could share more.