A plan to use laptops at a middle school in Palo Alto, California, has been put on hold after parents objected to the idea.
The Palo Alto Unified School District recently sent a letter to parents announcing that Jordan Middle School planned to buy 45 new Apple iBooks to share among 300 sixth-grade students.
Parents could choose to purchase a laptop for their own student if they wanted.
The plan drew criticism from some parents who felt that the plan would divide students into two groups, those who had their own laptop, and those who don't.
"If you have $2,000, you are a 'have.' If you do not spend $2,000, you are a 'have-not,'" parent Steve Weinstein told The San Jose Mercury News. "Equality in public schools is now a thing of the past."
The school still plans to buy and use the 45 laptops, but the purchase plan for individual students is on hold.
The school decided to pursue a laptop program after a successful pilot program this past spring.
Over the past few years, schools around the country have moved to replace stand-alone computer labs with laptops so technology can be better integrated into the curriculum.
Some schools have paid for the programs with grants and other means, while others have relied on parental support.
Maine Governor Angus King recently announced that every seventh-grader in the state would receive a laptop in fall 2002.
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Certify your gaming smarts: The University of Washington will offer a certificate in game development this winter.
The nine-month evening program is designed for computer programmers who are interested in pursuing a career in the gaming industry.
Students will learn about gaming culture and lingo, and study character development and scenarios. They will work with tools such as game engines and experiment with artificial intelligence.
By the end of the program, students will develop their own game with 3-D graphics and sound.
"From my experience, when we need to hire somebody, we are in trouble," Vassily Filippov, a lead engineer at Sierra On-line and a member of the program's advisory board, said in a statement. "We search and search, we get lots of applications but rarely do we get people we could hire."
Filippov said that the certificate program will be a good first step for those who want to enter the gaming field.
The program starts Jan. 10, 2002.
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Bi-coastal biz degree: Business schools at Berkeley and Columbia have paired up to offer a joint executive MBA. The program will launch in June 2002.
The program hopes to take advantage of two of the most important business and technology centers, New York City and Silicon Valley.
The Berkeley-Columbia EMBA, which offers 15 weeks of instruction over 19 months, will alternate between New York and California.
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Dollars for data analysis: Indiana University received a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a facility for processing data generated by large scientific instruments.
The facility, called AVIDD -- the Analysis and Visualization of Instrument-Driven Data Flows -- will be distributed across three IU campuses at Gary, Bloomington and Indianapolis, and linked through the university's high-speed optical fiber infrastructure.
AVIDD is an experimental supercomputer that is designed "to handle the tremendous output of data from the current generation of scientific instruments that produce digital data at tremendously large rates," according to Craig Stewart, the director of research and academic computing at IU.
AVIDD is designed to support the full "data life cycle," including data capture, transfer, real-time analysis, processing, storage and retrieval.
The distributed facility will be useful for research in archeology, anthropology, chemistry, biology, geology, atmospheric science and biomedical fields, Stewart said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
