Nov 30
Would OLPC Help Eliminate Poverty and Create Peace? Digital Vision by Nicholas Negroponte
“Why would a kid in the developing world need a laptop of all things, when they might not have food, they probably…in some cases don’t live beyond the age of five, they don’t have drinking water and parents earn dollar a day or less?
Good grief why should they have a laptop?
Take the word laptop and substitute the word education and no body would say that.
This ( XO Laptop ) is probably only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really have to look at … sort of … how to eliminate poverty and create peace, and work on the environment, I think, I can’t think of a better way to do it.” Says Nicholas Negroponte.
Nov 30, ‘07 –Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organisation, has worked to use computing as a means to bring education to the poorest regions of the world.
Since 2005 the focus of Professor Negroponte’s project has been to develop an innovative laptop that will be distributed to children across the developing world and cost about $100.
But founding pioneering initiatives is nothing new to the American computing guru. He obtained two professional architecture degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s and then set up MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in 1968.
In the 1980s he co-founded and directed the MIT Media Laboratory, where much of the technology that enabled the “digital revolution” was developed, including wireless communication, and progressive approaches to how children learn.
Professor Ken Morse, an MIT colleague, has called him: “An indefatigable leader. He has done an amazing job of recruiting incredibly busy people, including me, to help him with his crusade to bridge the digital divide”.
He has made it clear that his vision is not about the laptop itself. “It’s as if people spent all their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” Professor Negroponte told The New York Times. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”The latest laptop model, the XO, is now in production, and with interest from several developing nations, including Nigeria, Uruguay, and Libya, Negroponte’s vision is slowly becoming realised.
More at BBC News, LaptopGiving.org, OLPC.