More akin perhaps to a “jailbreak” of their devices (although that term typically means the removal of Apple-installed limitations on the devices) the students wanted their iPads to work the way they expected them to. They wanted—and found—a way to gain access to what they think of as the normal web, including the sites and application that districts often block: social networks, games, and music-streaming services.

CIPA, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, does require schools and libraries that receive federal E-rate funds to monitor minors’ Internet usage and to filter sites that are obscene, pornographic, and/or harmful to minors. But neither Facebook nor Pandora nor YouTube—all frequently blocked on school campuses across the country—fall into those categories, and it’s not clear whether CIPA extends to students’ usage of school-issued devices at home. Students, for their part, frequently cite the over-filtering of their school networks as one of the major impediments to their using technology to learn.

Even though much of their unfettered iPad usage in these recently publicized “hacking” cases involved, as The LA Times put it “non-schoolwork” and as NPR dismissed it “entertainment,” it’s important to recognize how students do learn with technology. It isn’t simply a matter of a digital version of analog lessons and readings—something implicitly presumed by the Los Angeles’s school system's plan to “limit the tablets, when taken home, to curricular materials from the Pearson corporation, which are already installed." Students listen to music and chat with friends while they study. Their iPad “hack”—their work-around—demonstrates their desire, not to mention their ability, to do just that.

It should prompt us to ask why we want students to have access—or not—to computers. Whose goals do computers meet? Apple’s? Pearson’s? The Department of Education’s? Or students’?

In his 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, education technology pioneer Seymour Papert predicted that computers would eventually “enter the private world of children everywhere.” As such they would be “carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change, … help[ing] people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across the traditional lines separating humanities from science and knowledge of the self from both of these.” Computers would “challenge current beliefs about who can understand what and at what age.”

But Papert’s arguments about “powerful devices” and “powerful ideas” and their capacity to transform teaching and learning run counter to the ways in which many schools view computers, even 35 years after the publication of his influential book. Computers are often viewed as a more efficient tool for testing, as an electronic and lighter-weight textbook, and so on.