IT in schools is rapidly growing - is it a good thing?

When a remote school on a Scottish island decided to buy every child and teacher a laptop, they found over £20,000 worth of savings from photocopying alone. The environmental savings are clear, and even if IT budgets have mushroomed in the last 10 years, it seems as if we are on the way - albeit slowly - to having one-laptop-per-child in schools. Indeed, there are projects such as the "miniBook" that are helping to make this possible. Is this a good thing for children, in terms of diversity of experience, of RSI, of methods of expression?

Clearly there are benefits in terms of environmental resources, access to rich content and data and learning resources, and the sense of ownership of their education that children apparently feel when they can take their miniBook home, for example.

Do these outweigh the disbenefits?

Personally, I would have been happy to have been educated with the aid of a computer, but my worries are these: repetitive strain injuries, children being tied-in to one means of expression (over-reliance), a compulsion on the part of the teachers to tailor lessons through computers that could be more creatively delivered in other ways. I'm also worried that an uninformed approach among some school ICT buyers could lead to a tie-in to proprietaryi systems such as Microsoft, that charge more for the license of the operating systemi than - for example - the miniBook (which uses the free Linuxi operating system) costs for the whole computer. There is also the connected danger of insufficiently creative software - through either tie-in to a certain operating system and/or high costs of software purchase, or insufficient capacity (RAMi, processing speed) in the computer.

It puzzles me - indeed - that the stated aim of these computers is to be useful in lessons such as English, History and Geography.  I want to write ON my novels in English, and I want to make diagrams and colorful drawings in History and Geography (in fact, I'd go further and say I want to act and roleplay in History, and get out in a field in Geography, which is even further away from computers). I would have thought we should be inspiring pupils with the power and potential of computers in subjects such as IT (durr), Art, Music, Drama, and Design, with topics such as web design, the basics of networking and how the world wide web works, desktop publishing, computer-aided-design, sound, music, video...

But all these require more processing power than the miniBook seems to provide.

Instead, the intention seems to be to just use computers as high-tech and in some cases inferior writing tablets.

I see great value in using - for example - Wikipedia to do research and to "read-around" subjects that the pupil wants more information about than the teacher can give them, or in a different way. I see less use for the computer as a mere input-device, or place to store one's thoughts/notes.

Indeed, note-taking on a computer is a very linear activity. Without - for example - (often cumbersome) mind-mapping software, how can computerised notes get away from the most uncreative forms of note-taking and dictation-taking?
Where is the space to draw, to illustrate, to doodle?

In summary, I am starting to think we need fewer writing tablets, more very powerful computers that will give people rich experiences. Otherwise, we are just swapping the technology for fancy paper, and - I think - in danger of children finding a computer as boring as most people find a blank piece of paper today.