End of the year contemplation: the $100 laptop

Emerging technologies and their effect on society MIT's Nicholas Negroponte has proposed and gone forward with his "$100 laptop" idea. Negroponte calls it the most important idea of his lifetime. It is about education, not the device itself. This link goes to a neat MIT site where you can watch the speech as a video or just listen (my choice when it is only a talking head.) Note: Negroponte presents the first PowerPoint he ever created, so you might want to watch rather than listen. How McLuhanesque that one of the first and most potent things that the villagers noticed and liked about the laptops was that the laptop provided the brightest light the families had. Hmmm. "Electricity is the most pure form of information." Some of the breakthrough ideas to my way of thinking are:

• "connectivity" is not a problem anymore
• the genesis of this idea is with Papert, Logo, and thinking machines from 1970s
• by putting tech in hands of kids, the tech "bleeds" into the family experience
• the cost of the laptops can be brought down because of the not-for-profit status

Ian from Malaysia has images of the cool laptop 100laptop