a young lady’s $100 illustrated primer
yes - i know that I’ve got neale stephenson permenantly on the brain.
I just wrote a (kind of unfair) response to Hanna’s (from WirelessToronto) questioning of nicolas negroponte’s project. I think she won’t mind because she knows that I like her and that i think she’s smart. right?
and this feels to me much more that they’re going for unintended consequences. they’ve explicity said that the hooplah about replacing textbooks is just a way to sell it to education ministers. it reminds me of “A young lady’s illustrated primer” (neale stephenson) more than anything else. From what I heard, people prefer the simputer for several reasons (didn’t require literacy, was built on open hardware) - but i am attracted to the lack of an real explanation for the $100 laptop project. (. . . .) It seems that instead of writing down all these reasons why this is a project and how it’s going to increase GDP by x%, lower malaria in 1/7th of cases, and resolve marital difficulties in 2 out of every 5 cases where the involved are originally from villages 50 kilometers apart, they are operating somewhat on faith / gut. That doesn’t usually get done on big projects like this - but it makes me kind of excited. Because most of the writing that gets done for projects is just approximations of commons sense backed up by massaged numbers, anyways.
combine that with the fact that they’re going with the Squeak Smalltalk environment - and I think they might be trying to raise a generation of hackers. like a couple billion of them.
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=270
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=241
and up pops croquet once again (”Croquet is a next generation virtual OS written in Squeak“). interesting.
November 24th, 2005 at 1:11 am
always question. it wasn’t unfair - there is nothing i like more than a sharp debate. :)
and it’s not so much that disagree with Negroponte’s OLFC (one laptop for every child), it’s just that i cringe whenever i am exposed to unbridled technological determinism. naivete. “optimism”.
you: academics get fined each time they let optimism
go unchecked, no?
me: har har.
that being said, i’m a big fan of how this project has caught the attention of so many different groups of people - tech savvy or not, and renewed discussion/interest in this area.
December 1st, 2005 at 5:03 am
Pidgin to Creole - the nativization of ICT technologies
I’ve been thinking a bunch about what I said about the $100 dollar laptop project, hugh’s continuation of that discussion, and alison’s response – which I took to mean either that she was arguing that the use of information and…