TED: Nicholas Negroponte On OLPC

MIT Media Lab founder and "Being Digital" author Nicholas Negroponte stopped by the EG conference last December to give a sort of status update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project he's been driving for the past two years. The project's mandate is to create an inexpensive, durable and well-designed laptop that costs less than 100$ per unit for distribution in 3rd world countries and poverty-stricken communities.

The big message of the night had to do with for-profit sales of the OLPC in a program called Give One, Get One. Basically, buy a laptop for ~$400, and they'll donate one on your behalf to a needy child somewhere. So, rather than suggest each person in the room buy one (there were about 300 people that were present), Negroponte suggested they use their mailing lists and tell all their friends.

In the spirit of that request, here's the link for the Give One, Get One Website: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php, and following through with Dr. Negroponte's message, I ask you to do the same. Send this post (or the link), hit the digg link in the top right corner, even just mention it at that cocktail party you're late for... Just get the word out.

WIth that plug in place, I have some other insights and thoughts after the video...



Marred by both skepticism and controversy (the CTO departed very publicly in March to start her own for-profit company "to commercialize OLPC's technology, including the screen and battery"), Negroponte was back and re-focusing the message, starting with the benefits of being an NFP instead of a for-profit organization (as was widely advised before launch):

"The clarity of purpose is there; the moral purpose is clear. I can see any head of state, any executive I want, anytime because I'm not selling laptops."

The other nifty point he makes, and one that I personally dug, was that part of the user interaction design for the OLPC is to help children learn how to learn:

"Seymour [Papert] made a very simple observation in 1968... that children who write computer programs understand things differently, and when they debug the programs, the come the closest to learning about learning."

See the video on TED

More Brilliantly Halting Prescience...

I was researching something and came across this old interview with Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT (link to her personal site) in support of her 1996 book "Life On The Screen." Some choice tidbits (Dr. Turkle noted where appropriate, otherwise it's the author of the article, Pamela McCorduck):

"Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets."

"In terms of technologies that have really changed people's deepest conceptions of self, we've had a long run with print," Turkle says. "Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn't go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we've adapted from print as natural. But we're in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don't. Computers are central to this. I'm not saying that other technologies haven't changed us, I'm just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to - this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer - this is new."

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here