Can the $100 Laptop Change the World?
Laurie Rowell,
eLearn Magazine,
Mar 05, 2007
The answer suggested by this article is "yes" and I am inclined to agree. As George Siemens notes, the first paragraph tells the story. "What if every child in the world could have a free personal laptop? Put some e-books on it, make it Web-capable, and add a palette of media tools so children could work on creative projects. Wouldn't that be incredible?" Yes it would. But there's a lot more to this story. Like, for example, how the development work proceeded. "These academicians have ideas and they aren't afraid to use them. One is that we learn by creating. Another is that education is a community-based effort and hierarchical institutions get in the way." Makes me realize that my own research organization has procedures in place to make sure something like this never happens. And like, for example, how it can be used. "Imagine a room filled with students capable of passing digital notes to each other at every point during a lesson." Leonard Low also comments on the OLPC project, saying they are too large to be considered mobile technology - a proposition with which I disagree.
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