{"id":692,"date":"2007-10-20T08:22:28","date_gmt":"2007-10-20T07:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=692"},"modified":"2007-10-20T08:22:28","modified_gmt":"2007-10-20T07:22:28","slug":"one-laptop-per-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=692","title":{"rendered":"One laptop per child"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not often in life that one meets someone who is truly charismatic and inspirational, but this week I was fortunate to hear Nicholas Negroponte speak at an event in Westminster entitled &#8220;Parliament &#038; The Internet &#8221; and he totally capivated his audience with his enthusiasm and sincerity. He flew over that morning from the United States and was flying back that evening, but that afternoon he was with us to talk about his project for <a href=\"http:\/\/laptop.org\/\">One Laptop per Child<\/a> (OLPC).<br \/>\nThe mission of the OLPC movement is to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world. This has involved developing a unique computer with very special characteristics and an incredible price of around $100 a unit. It does not require a power source, it can be powered up by a child, it works in the sun, it connects to the Internet, and it uses open source software.<br \/>\nFor me personally, the story started in 1995 when I read &#8220;Being Digital&#8221; by Negroponte [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/cbooks.html#Being%20Digital\">here<\/a>]. Then, in 2000, I actually met the guy at a dot com launch in London and he signed his book for me. Then I blogged about the One Laptop per Child project when it was first launched two years ago [my posting <a href=http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.co.uk\/nighthawk-static\/permalink.php?id=2145_0_1_0_C\">here<\/a>].<br \/>\nIn his fluent and unscripted address, Negroponte called the laptop &#8220;such a cute and sexy device&#8221; but insisted that &#8220;We are not a laptop project &#8211; we are an education project&#8221;. The laptop will be launched in the next few weeks, but he brought one along to the meeting and passed it around for us to play with. The plan is to ship 5-10M computers in 2008 and 50-100M in 2009.<br \/>\nI took a photograph of the laptop with my mobile:<br \/>\n<center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/OLPC.jpg\"  border=3><\/center><br \/>\nA colleague took a picture of me trying out the laptop:<br \/>\n<center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/OLPC2.jpg\"  border=3><\/center><br \/>\nAn interesting story: Negroponte was asked about the green colour of the laptop which it was assumed reflected his wish that the project was ecologically sound. Well, no, said the man. Following support at a critical time from the then President of the Nigeria, Negroponte decided that the laptop would bear that country&#8217;s national colours of green and white<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s a lot of cynicism around but, if this project succeeds (as I believe it will), in a few years time Negroponte will be collecting the Nobel prize for peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not often in life that one meets someone who is truly charismatic and inspirational, but this week I was fortunate to hear Nicholas Negroponte speak at an event in Westminster entitled &#8220;Parliament &#038; The Internet &#8221; and he totally capivated his audience with his enthusiasm and sincerity. He flew over that morning from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}