Granted, I tend to think more outside the box than many I suppose, but... Alex Steffen, at World Changing, recently unveiled their first One Laptop Per Child machine (OLPC)--a project designed to provide access to educational content for the children in the developing world. The laptop is pictured here.
Here's a person's comment to his excited post: "It would probably been [sic] more useful to supply African schoolchildren with other great, versatile, robust and useful innovations: books, paper and pencils."
Well, yes. That would be nice indeed. So let's think this out a bit, shall we?
If we spent the same amount of money on books, paper, and pencils, which has the greatest potential to impact the world for good? Should we afford the third world with second-rate, static learning consumables that are outdated by at least 3 years when they hit market and provide the children with the hope of writing a paper that their parents may well not even be able to read?
Or perhaps, perchance, just maybe, I mean it's only a thought: we take at least some steps to give children the opportunity to connect to the body of knowledge available to the 1,000,000,000 people connected to the world wide web so the children can produce instead of consume, produce knowledge products that can be shared with the whole of the planet, make a contribution beyond their family, their village, their impoverished state?
OLPC has the potential to significantly impact a child's education, more than any other wireless device I can think of, like OPPC (One Pencil Per Child).
I grow weary of ignorance and lack of vision, of slavery to a hackneyed system of education that has allowed third world countries to remain victimized by over-indulgent world markets.
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