Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT’s Media Lab announced a new initiative this year: to equip children in 3rd world countries with a $100 laptop. Negroponte demonstrated a prototype at MIT this week. He also demonstrated one of the most powerful reality distortion fields in academia.
“If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education,” Negroponte said … And “in education, the roadblock is the laptop.”
Funny, I always thought the problem was lack of funding and teachers. The process of education really hasn’t changed in the last few hundred years.
This reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”, in which a generation of children in a third-world countries are trained using automated interactive electronic books. They make good soldiers, but all the technology in the world can’t replace a compassionate teacher.