The Sacred Heart Palm Project

"Walk into the main hall at the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School (CSH) in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood on any given Monday morning and you’ll see a huddle of students holding their Palm IIIc PDAs toward a wall-mounted, infrared beaming station. Like bees around a hive, the group is collecting information invisibly.

In fifteen seconds they’ll have downloaded their weekly class schedules, their homework assignments for every class, as well as the school calendar, sports schedule and daily announcements from what they call an 'electronic cubby hole....'

Maggie, a senior, passes a group of ninth-graders in the hall using their Palms, takes a quick look and says, 'I’m soooo jealous of you guys.' It’s the ultimate compliment and an unsolicited validation of coolness....

On the first day of school, the entire freshman class—all 54 of them—were presented with brand new Palm IIIc handheld organizers, instead of Texas Instruments scientific calculators. With an educational discount from Palm, supplemented with funding from CSH, costs for the students’ parents was a wash...." [Design Interact]

Hmmmm... do they have a school library and is the librarian involved in any of this? Inquiring minds want to know!

Dave P. says:

"If you're looking to get wireless in libraries, the simplest solution is probably to get some local nerds to stop by on a Saturday afternoon and hook up a donated Airport Base Station or two. Much easier than trying to find a tech-person on a regular basis, or trying to procure the hardware through channels. As for maintainance, once it's up and running, it keeps running. If you find the right nerds, they'll probably even donate a base station (at $300 per base-station, it's a distinct possibility)."

But how many local nerds are visiting the library? These days, even the smallest library needs a tech consultant because with all of the use our computers get, they go down a lot. Let me stress "a lot." But I'd encourage any and all local nerds to go meet their local public librarians and help jump-start them on the road to wireless. Let them know that there are folks out there who would use this service, because a lot of libraries don't think there is a need.