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In 2005 computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte announced his bold plan to build a laptop that costs $100 and deliver it to the world's 150 million poorest schoolchildren in just 4 years. But the Wall Street Journal's Steve Stecklow says competition from companies like Intel and Microsoft seems to have put that goal out of reach.
not to mention his idea was flawed from the beginning.
are american children now dominating the academic world because of their early access to computers and the internet?
of course not. the idealism doesn't take account of what children actually use such tools for. games. computers have been installed in us classrooms for many years now, forcing countless children to endure such nonsense as silly math games and oregon trail in some delusion that this is augmenting their education.
china has it right, build infrastructure that will serve your society for generations, not invest in some ego stroking techheads gadget.
I partly agree--computers are no panacea, and can be easily abused.
But for a kid living somewhere in the rural 3rd world, with no access to a library, this could be a means for connecting with something more than very basic educational opportunities.
Access to information from a good library (even to the still limited degree that is now the case) is worth the risk of the perils of the 'Oregon Trail' .
Also, if there are 10 million kids with laptops out there, sites will develop around their particular needs/interests. Yes, those sites will have ads and the usual internet crap, but still.
The broadcast story said that only a few thousand prototype units had been installed. In fact, installation of the first hundred thousand production units in Uruguay has begun. Confirmed orders have reached 410,000 units (Dec. 2, 2007) for Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico. For a nonprofit, more than $80 million in sales in the first month is, I believe, unprecedented. OLPC is on track to sell more than a billion dollars worth of product in its first full year. So nobody should write it off at this early stage.
It is important to understand that orders were not accepted until the design was complete and production was under way, early in November 2007. It would have been unethical to write contracts for unknown products.
Now that the process has begun, governments still have to go through their legally mandated processes for appropriating money and putting programs out for bid. OLPC will be the low-price bidder, and the XO has a lot of educational advantages, although it is slower than the Classmate PC and the Eee.
I think Nick Negroponte will go down in history, whether or not his project survives the corporate/non-profit infighting.
The universality of the original concept, the prompting of total world wide interconnectivity, is probably as profound an extrapolation of the computer and the worldwide web as the photo taken of the whole Earth was an extrapolation of photography.
To reduce the value of computers to “gadgets” upon which to play games misreads reality. Computer skills are required for the vast majority of jobs we Americans will take right now. Thus, our need for an illegal immigrant population, by the way. Moreover, those gaming skills put on a literally devastating international display at the beginning of the first Gulf War and have been used liberally on Serbian, Afghanistani, and Iraqi homes over the years.
There are so many uses for these machines that we can not imagine what these children, our children, all over the world will create with it.
The Genie is out of the bottle and I , for one, like it much more than the one we unleashed in 1945.
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