Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.
When you drink the water, remember the river.
Friday, January 12, 2007
"One laptop per child"
"One laptop per child", especially in poor countries. A wonderful initiative. The chairman is Nicholas Negroponte, who I have admired since I read his seminal book Being Digital. He has written a nice FAQ. OLPC is at laptop.org
4 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Nice Idea but it will never transpire. We are too busy financing wars and space stations for further wars and spying on our neighbors and sending silly tonka truck toys to run around on Mars.
Hey, I think I had mentioned this project some time ago! :-) And I like that yellow color, it feels... optimistic!
If being optimistic about the good in Man is being stupid, call me Dopey Dwarf (and move aside, I have a smooch from Snow White to receive). There are both good and evil, everywhere. Evil must be seen to be fought/counterbalanced. Good mus be focused on because this focusing gives us precious drive to keep trying, all our life (lives?).
Anon is right, there IS also a lot of good stuff happening. It just doesn't naturally grab the media's attention as much as the rest. But it's there allright.
I find this project about as useful as handing a new pair of Nike shoes to every kid in Africa. First, you can't do much with just 1GB of memory space. And then, before giving these kids computers, how about teaching them to READ? In the USA (not in Africa or Asia), about one third of youngsters finishing high school can't read properly. Will this laptop be of any use? I'd say some paper and pencils are as easy to carry around, and much cheaper. Even at $100, if you want to equip millions of children, you're gonna end up with a hefty bill, soon amounting to billions of dollars. That's a lot of money for a poor country. So, I'm not convinced this is more than a well-meaning waste of effort.
A noble idea, but methinks there's better and more useful stuff to do to help the children in poor countries. For starters, aim to stop the stupid wars happening there, so one day they can afford their own real PC.
4 comments:
Nice Idea but it will never transpire. We are too busy financing wars and space stations for further wars and spying on our neighbors and sending silly tonka truck toys to run around on Mars.
Sure, way too much is used on fighting, but there is a lot of great stuff happening in charity and education.
Hey, I think I had mentioned this project some time ago! :-)
And I like that yellow color, it feels... optimistic!
If being optimistic about the good in Man is being stupid, call me Dopey Dwarf (and move aside, I have a smooch from Snow White to receive). There are both good and evil, everywhere. Evil must be seen to be fought/counterbalanced. Good mus be focused on because this focusing gives us precious drive to keep trying, all our life (lives?).
Anon is right, there IS also a lot of good stuff happening. It just doesn't naturally grab the media's attention as much as the rest. But it's there allright.
I find this project about as useful as handing a new pair of Nike shoes to every kid in Africa. First, you can't do much with just 1GB of memory space. And then, before giving these kids computers, how about teaching them to READ? In the USA (not in Africa or Asia), about one third of youngsters finishing high school can't read properly. Will this laptop be of any use?
I'd say some paper and pencils are as easy to carry around, and much cheaper. Even at $100, if you want to equip millions of children, you're gonna end up with a hefty bill, soon amounting to billions of dollars. That's a lot of money for a poor country. So, I'm not convinced this is more than a well-meaning waste of effort.
A noble idea, but methinks there's better and more useful stuff to do to help the children in poor countries. For starters, aim to stop the stupid wars happening there, so one day they can afford their own real PC.
Just my two rupees of cynical realism.
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