Reading today’s articles in Technology Review, News.com and ZDNet got me thinking about the implications of combining the $100 laptops being developed by MIT Media Labs (with the help of corporate sponsors including Google, AMD, News Corp, Red Hat and BrightStar), with the Wikibooks movement that aims to use the Wiki development model to create curriculums of kindergarten-to-college textbooks available at no cost in multiple languages.
As we discussed in an IPD post yesterday, the Wikibook movement has the potential to combine input from a relatively small number of geographically scattered teachers and experts with a grassroots Wiki-development network driven by “student-power.” This potential looks even more compelling when combined with Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of equipping children in developing countries with low cost, open source, energy efficient, environmentally hardened and network-ready laptops that, if need be, can be powered by a hand crank.
Speaking at an MIT conference yesterday, Negroponte referred to the goal of his One Laptop Per Child non-profit group as “open source education.” Noting that “[e]ven in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water,” he pointed out that “[o]nly part of learning comes from teaching. A lot of learning comes from exploration.”
According to the News.com story, One Laptop Per Child “is in discussions with five countries—Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa—to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children.” It is also hoping to use commercial sales to subsidize its educational agenda.
While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. “Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids’ laptops. We’re still working on that,” he said.
At the end of his ZDNet piece, David Berlind raises an interesting question:
I asked Negroponte how he felt about the Catch-22 proposition that’s created when a government like China hands systems like his out to all of its primary and secondary school students while at the same time stifling their ability to use the systems to exercise freedom of speech through technologies like blogs (the Chinese government is cracking down on bloggers). Answered Negroponte: It’s a Trojan horse…It’s no wonder that Negroponte considers this to be his life’s most important work. If he’s successful, it’ll probably put him on track for a Nobel Peace Prize as well.
Mitch Shapiro at 12:36 PM|Comments(0)
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