Weblogg-ed » One Laptop Per Child Begins…$14 Billion on Easter
Will Richardson has some thought-provoking comments on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which is currently beginning in some countries. If you haven’t heard, the OLPC initiative is a program in which durable, child-friendly laptops that just cost $100 apiece are being distributed in third world countries. These machines run open source software and are completely web-enabled.
Richardson points to some photos of children in Nigeria who are just beginning to use the laptops. He goes on to wonder what it’s going to take to get a similar initiative in our own country:
I don’t want to look at these pictures as a call to arms…it’s a celebration. It’s no doubt an important moment. But it should give us all pause. In a society that is more concerned with the father of Anna Nicole’s baby, one that spent almost $14 billion on Easter stuff, (the equivalent of 140 million laptops, btw) what’s it going to take before we understand what No Child Left Behind really means?
I would add this: Many of the kids in my own district go home where there simply isn’t the money for technology. Admittedly, in many cases the technology priorities in those homes are for videogames, but we’ll save that for a different post. Their more affluent peers are MySpace-ing and IM’ing all the time, but they’re also getting a leg up by getting some research done and keeping up on the news going on around them. Their connection is giving them an advantage that many of the other kids just don’t have. It would be nice to get that playing field a little more level. Here’s the link to Will’s original post:
Link to Weblogg-ed » One Laptop Per Child Begins…$14 Billion on Easter
