Arguing for the lowest cost solutions to provide ubiquitous technology access to all students, Miguel Guhlin makes some very powerful arguments in his latest Techlearning blog entry. Here’s a snippet:

I do know that the more money I save on the equipment, software, and traditional textbooks, the more I focus on technology to to foster collaboration and information literacy, on "people as the curriculum," the more I can invest in people. Let’s invest in people, not things.

The return on investment is in what children learn to do in spite of life’s obstacles, of how they can use one technology to prepare them for the next. That process, the "how" of learning and "what they do with it," is what I want them to get out of using the technology. MS Powerpoint, Moviemaker, Photostory, iMovie? Who cares? Activities like digital storytelling, blogging, podcasting, problem-based learning engage us all as human beings. . .if a cheap pencil will do as well as MS Word in today’s schools, then our money, time and effort has been going to the wrong people.

Maybe, it’s time to invest in children, teachers, administrators, and parents…instead of Microsoft, Apple, and other proprietary software vendors.

Miguel really challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom about the way we allocate our tech dollars, and moreover, there’s an underlying unspoken value to the piece — our schools exist to teach our kids, not be the next great untapped market for corporations. I hold out hope that there’s a powerful middle ground where corporations can work with schools to provide powerful, low cost technology solutions, but I also powerfully know the frustration that lurks behind what Miguel writes.