Tag Archive for 'OLPC'

No News Here? Try Elsewhere

You may have noticed that I’m not updating here very often at present. One of the reasons for this is that I’m spending an increasing amount of my time posting on OLPC News.

By complete coincidence, the originator of that site and I have a friend in common - Sabina Behague. Via the wonders of social blogging tools, he found a post of mine about OLPC- Technorati, I think -and we posted on each other’s sites expressing concerns about the One Laptop per Child initiative…

…well, now I’m doing my thing for the OLPC News cause by posting there a few times a week. This will allow me not to clog up this site with stuff the majority of my friends and family are not really bothered about. It also gives me something non-Tommy related to do!
As to why Hannah isn’t posting here much, let me just say she spends four days a week in the field and fills about two exercise books a week with field notes. She then spends two whole days a week typing them up. Hopefully, Hannah will be able to put something up about her work soon, however, doing so has ethical implications that have yet to be resolved (readers are not supposed to know where the work is based or who it’s talking about).

It looks likely anyone interested will have to wait until her thesis is published in 2008/9 (unless I can convince her to set up an anonymous blog on wordpress.com).

$100 laptop is not a pencil

Nicholas Negroponte, ex-head of MIT media labs and the driving force behind OLPC is claiming that his brainchild, the $100 laptop, is as vital to a child as a pencil. After a rash of recent press attacking the fundamentals of his project, Negroponte tagged the following soundbite to his response to those who doubt the project’s fundamental premises:

I wonder if you would advocate one pencil per classroom, or a special room for all pencils, called a ‘writing room’.

This is not the first time that his line has been trotted out by the OLPC. I came across this first whilst reading the FAQ section of their website:

Continue reading ‘$100 laptop is not a pencil’