Journal Article 1 Computing in the Clouds

After reading the article about "cloud" computing, my biggest concern is security of the documents that are created.  Students on any public school computer would have the expectation that no one will ever be able to access their documents, except possibly a "professional hacker."  I don't feel the security concern is addressed in a way that I am comfortable and would want my own children to write documents at school.  I feel there is an element of "Oh, it's just students writing articles, so there's nothing of importance that anyone would want to access anyway."

The author says he studies the privacy settings of any online program he uses, but then says the only insurance against problems associated with unwarranted data access is living a completely sin-free life.  What does that mean?

Where the information is stored is vague to me.  It say either a local-area network, a district intranet, or the internet itself.  Who is responsible if it crashes?

I do appreciate the cost savings to schools by using the netbooks.  The high school where I work has computer labs with ancient Dells that take five minutes or so just for the students to log on and they're very slow to operate.  It's such a waste of their time.  Thus, most teachers don't take advantage of the students' using computer technology.

For a school district to ask parents to buy netbooks, as well as the district investing in netbooks, would be a considerable outlay, even at $350 each.  Even the author admits that the sustainability of the cloud computing revenue model is anybody's guess.  What if that changes?  Also, do we want students to be bombarded with advertisements on the computers they use at school?  Who decides which advertisements are appropriate?

I don't feel comfortable, based on the information in the article, that school districts should adopt this form of computing at their school sites at this point in time.