A few evenings before the first day of school, a Toronto branch of the electronics chain Future Shop is buzzing.
The stretch of laptops on display is obscured by a sea of bodies, many of them students scoping out dozens of shiny new models.
As his sister Eesha, 20, strokes a MacBook Air she might like for her first year at university in Toronto, Tariq Hussain, 13, says he's thinking of ways to persuade his father to buy him one, too, after they return home to Pakistan.
"All my friends have one," he says, admitting that homework would be a lower priority than video games.
Three young Toronto friends, Vivian Tharrenos, Rebecca Kang and Michelle Norman, are debating the finer points of photo storage and visual appeal over a Hewlett-Packard model.
"This one is smooth and sleek," says Ms. Kang, 17, who is about to start studying hospitality at college. "It looks really nice."
A few steps away, Alejandro Rodriguez, 15, clutches a box containing the new Toshiba laptop he's taking home to Venezuela after a family visit. "It's black," he says, grinning.
Remember when back-to-school supplies consisted of pencils, erasers and a few crisp, new notebooks in primary colours? Now that the cellphone is ubiquitous and kids have TVs in their bedrooms, the laptop, it seems, is the universal - and in this store, international - must-have.
It helps that prices have dropped enormously in the past five years - shoppers tonight are considering models that cost about $600.
Market research group NPD estimates that the period from July through September will see Canadian consumers spending in excess of $1-billion on computer and office electronics, software and accessories. While back-to-school laptop sales have enjoyed a modest growth of only 3 per cent over last year, the fact that there's been no decline is big news, according to Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst for NPD.
While some sectors of the economy are shaky, back-to-school shopping is taking precedence over almost anything else, he says. "Parents will go to work naked rather than send their kids to school without the right stuff."
And one Future Shop store manager, Umair Kamal, says the trend has trickled down to capture elementary-school children.
"We're finding children in Grade 3 or 4 want to be able to go on the Internet to work on projects," he says.
Just how much bang students are getting for their laptop buck, education-wise, is not easy to measure. It's still unclear whether school-owned laptops are living up to their potential in elementary and high schools, according to some observers. Adding personal laptops to the mix risks opening the gates to more Grand Theft Auto, more porn, and more risky behaviour among students.
But it doesn't have to. Laptops can have many positive effects on literacy and children's life skills, says Linda Cameron, associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The portable technology has been targeted in schools toward kids with difficulties in motor control - which would affect holding a pencil, for instance - and to children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and disorders such as Asperger syndrome. But the use of laptops in school is as varied as the number of districts and individual schools out there. "It's not an across-the-board thing," Dr. Cameron says.
In some schools, kids rotate into laptop labs for research - at the teacher's discretion. Others use laptops for innovative projects such as real-time pen pals or exchanges with adult authors. Dr. Cameron has witnessed laptops being used for mundane fill-in-the-blanks drills, rather than in-depth research or computer literacy. Still others sit gathering dust.
This patchwork approach does little to offset the potential for negative effects, Dr. Cameron says.
"What disturbs me is we're not educating kids in a critical way about content," she says. "There is an unbelievable amount of potential for the computer. But kids need to learn what the limits are."
That would rule out "hours and hours" of computer games and pornography, which might be replaced by social-networking education and safety, or could include discussions about the accuracy of sources such as Wikipedia.
"Teacher and parents are really unaware of the pernicious possibilities of what is available to kids. They absolutely have to wake up and start doing media literacy and help kids develop a critical eye," Dr. Cameron says.
Without those systems in place, author Mark Bauerlein says, the scenario he outlines in his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future will continue to replicate itself.
He says that today, while college students come to class armed with more laptops, their vocabularies are shrinking. The skill of reading a complex text and analyzing it has become extinct, he says. "They're very good at information retrieval, pretty poor on analysis and reflection."
In a recent survey Dr. Bauerlein cites, college professors said that only 6 per cent of their first-year students entered class well prepared in writing. As a result, remedial writing courses are on the rise. For those who miss the boat, he says, corporate America now spends $3.1-billion a year on remedial writing training for their employees.
Dr. Bauerlein says there are no studies to suggest that the current use of laptops in education is benefiting students' achievements on the whole. What's more, technology is moving too fast for schools to keep up.
"The computer is an empowerment tool," says Dr. Bauerlein, who is also a professor of English at Atlanta's Emory University. "It's very quickly responsive to users, which means it is pushing the activity of the kids beyond the control of the teachers." One teacher he spoke to says he's turned from being a teacher into a learning monitor, on the lookout for porn and MySpace pages.
While the role of computers continues to play out at school, one of the best ways parents can infiltrate the online life of their kids is not just to monitor, but to enforce radio silence.
He suggests parents enforce a no-technology reading hour at home. Everyone unplugs and reads, whether it's a comic or a cookbook.
"You unplug, log off. Disconnect. Parents have to do it too. It can be Conan; it doesn't have to be Under the Volcano."