$100 Laptop Founder Nicholas Negroponte Says He Ignores Criticism of the Project





Video highlights: XO versus Classmate

The BBC News website visited Nigeria to see Africa's first large scale test of the XO laptop - a portable computer designed for the world's poorest children.

The One Laptop Per Child Project's so-called $100 laptop, also known as the XO, incorporates technology and software specially developed to cope with the inhospitable conditions found in many developing nations.

Comments

Beauty said…
People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. Awesome thinking for the period but American solutions may not work in Africa.

"It's an education project, not a laptop project." — Nicholas Negroponte but the adman's dream that hides behind "create a cause, not a business" is a cynical business model that may one day turn around and bite the hand that fed it.

We believe "Technology will Determine the Future of the Human Race" as presented by Lord Broers in his "The Triumph of Technology" during the Reith Lectures 2005. But my problem with this project is not about the technology which is remarkable; the missing bits are simply the social side of the system. Take water for example, the children we are about to educate do not have enough of it. The brainware lot that have collaborated on this project should focus on this problem and piggy-back on this to deliver OLPC. When is it OK to educate world's poorest children but keep them hungry?
12:14 PM
EKENYERENGOZI Michael Chima said…
Who are you?
Your erudition is so remarkable that I cannot but agree with your rationale on this Nicholas Negroponte's dream. But let the children have the laptops first and let the Nigerian government do the best to provide the three square meals and safe water they need to balance the equation of modern civilization in a competitive world.

If you give me the PC of my dream, I will use it to feed myself and even typing letters for the illiterates in my village for $0.20 per letter in Word and that would be enough to save the money to hire labourers to sink a borehole and also grow some food crops and cash crops to make ends meet and save some cash to open a computer literacy centre in my village.
Therefore, the OLPC is enough to transform lives in Nigeria.

Cheers and God bless.
2:41 AM
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