One Laptop per Child

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Project, originally championed by Nicholas Negroponte, to provide the word's children with a $100 laptop computer.

It is now called the Children's Machine.

URL = http://www.olpcnews.com/


Status Report March 2007

"A lot has happened in that year and a half. The machine itself evolved. (As did its name: the “$100 laptop” was scrapped in favor of the “Children’s Machine XO” because the laptops cost about $135.) The technology is “clock-stopping hot” according to Wayan Vota, who writes OLPCnews.com, an unofficial clearinghouse for anything and everything OLPC. From energy efficiency to screen technology to connectivity to open source software, Vota argues that OLPC laptops are revolutionary machines, not stripped down playthings, and that they’ll soon be leading the rest of the computer world, not following.

Politically, too, OLPC keeps chugging along. Nicholas Negroponte, the media-savvy frontman, unveiled a prototype in 2005 with then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. At least fifteen countries (including pioneers Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay) signed on. And full-scale production is scheduled to begin within a few months.

But the basic idea hasn’t changed: create a rugged, efficient, powerful but intuitive laptop and get education ministries around the world to buy it for their young people in large numbers. (No order below one million laptops will be accepted.) This is “an education project, not a laptop project,” Negroponte is fond of saying. Walter Bender, who runs content and software for OLPC describes the project as a Trojan horse: You think you’re getting an e-book reader, or a math helper, or a digital camera, or a music composition system (it is all these things and more), the analogy goes, when the secret payload is actually kids with laptops, connected to each other and to the world." (http://www.radioopensource.org/one-laptop-per-child/)


More Information

Radio Open Source on One Laptop per Child