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Story: Why every child deserves a laptop

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$100 laptop: moving from a technical to a social debate

This is a fairly length reply but please stick with it: I have lived and breathed this project for a little while now. I write in reponse to the suggestion of "shovels not laptops" and to further develop some of the key points that Red Hat's CEO Matthew Szulik brought up.

The minimum order is 1 million laptops. The delivery of those laptops will represent the largest single human network ever created in one go. It will form a network with phenomenal potential. Networks succeed if they have a shared reference point which holds emotional import: see Facebook, Friends Re-united for online examples and think of any association or membership. The emotional reference point provides the essential component for active engagement.

The laptop itself is an object to which the kids will have great emotional attachment: the head of the project, Nicholas Negroponte, reported an almost 0 breakage rate after 2 years with a pilot project in Cambodia. Why? Because the kids treat the laptop as their most valued possession and so take good care of them. The new type of education that they will all be receiving will also be a shared reference point.

I think it is time the debate stopped focusing around whether or not the capability exists to produce the laptops. Let's start from the assumption that they have been made and 1 million kids in Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Thailand, China and Lybia have them. Assume a network with the tools to facilitate communication between the teachers and the students of those countries: what is the likely results of relations between those countries in 10 years time?

Taking the 6 countries above, that’s 6 million kids who have access to the largest ever encyclopaedia and the largest search database of information ever: Wikipedia and Google. And who have the capability to communicate with each other and the world as if next door.

Let's assume wireless networks because quite frankly, they are not the major obstacle. What projects could happen using the laptops? Kids go to a nearby farm. During their visit they can all see each other's laptops on the mesh network. They can question the farming techniques using Google and Wikipedia, and they can collaborate on exercises. Now take the event set up to a museum, into the streets near a school to talk about history where it happened or to the local blacksmith who makes shovels.

What about e-mail exchange programs? A kid in Argentina with a kid from the UK. One week they mail in English the next in Spanish. When I was at school the exchange program was for a privileged few. This route would provide access to all who have a laptop.

What about recording the BEST teachers of maths, science, farming techniques and make the same audio recording available to 1 million kids? All kids, the same education from the best teachers. Part of my future plans include filming every lecture at my old university: Cambridge UK. I think it insane that for any given lecture the buildings are paid for, 40 students' places (of whom on 20 turn up) are paid for, the lecturer is paid for and yet there is not a camera filming it. And a lot of the cost is covered by the tax payer. MIT have taken the lead in doing exactly this in the US and hats off to them. The days of streaming such video content to the $100 laptop are not here, but they will be.

Now, what happens when you emerge from 12+ years of education taking for granted being networked to your classmates and the globe and receiving an education well above that which the teachers at your school could have given you without the laptops? What happens to social consciousness when kids can't be left out and know how to educate themselves? The very psychology of sensing both those close to you and on the other side of globe is what is needed to start seriously tackling the major issues of our age: global warming, war, poverty, famine....... It is the greatest means to those ends I have come across to date.

A new global

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