OLPC Video Preview

My last post on OLPC (the One Laptop Per Child initiative) here on Profy was a consideration of its potential, and I kept a rosy view of the project throughout the piece, mostly to signify some faith held on my part for the long-term goal of the team behind it. Now Technology Review???s feature story on OLPC has been garnished with a worthwhile seven-minute clip of sliced interviews with some of the key players and thinkers behind the push - the head honchos, if you will.

In the video, Nicholas Negroponte offers up an rhetorical argument and rebuttal:

“Why would a kid in the developing world need a laptop, of all things, when they might not have food, probably??? don???t live beyond the age of 5, they don???t have drinking water??? and the parents earn a dollar a day or less? Good grief, why should they have a laptop?”

“Take the word laptop, and substitute [it] with the word ???education???, and nobody would say that.”

Negroponte hits the nail on the head right there. It is indeed about learning. To implement a costlier distribution system to deliver tangible ink-and-paper textbooks to children in developing countries, rather than pilot a techno-centric system to help better level the ground the world???s education systems are built upon, would only keep the ???developing??? behind the ???developed.??? Web 2.0 is the newest step in better connecting the world. OLPC intends to do that. It won???t hurt to try, will it?