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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.....cont.....

......i think I must have exceeded the limit in my last post and so the last part was chopped........So to continue where I got cut off:

A new global culture is emerging that does not have a country. It is defined by groups of interest: you can spend time and communicate online with those groups who share your interests. You may be a member of 10 groups with members from 100 countries. I think if these $100 laptop kids are able to be part of that developing culture then they have access to the world stage in way that they have never had before. I think that if you have friends in lots of countries then the likelihood of those kids growing into adults who understand, and care about on a personal basis, the needs of those other countries is greater.

Let's not forget that they own the operating system. Let's not forget one of the greatest capacities of human kind: a child's ability to learn a language. I have never forgotten seeing a documentary of a group of deaf orphans in Nicaragua. It was post civil war and the kids came from all parts of the country. They had different types of sign language but slowly learnt each others’. We were told by the narrator of the documentary that we were about to see the best "signer" in the world: a 4 year old kid, apparently with a grammar to his sign language. He had pulled together all the different sign languages and mixed in his brain’s propensity to develop language skills. Now what happens when that same propensity for language learning and development goes to work on Linux? .....kids can do things that the matured minds and billions of Microsoft could never dream of.

Given that they are on a mesh network, is it not likely that they will build tools for self-organisation? Tools for educating those that come after them even better? What are the long term social, economic, political and environmental consequences of that?

I am in Argentina at the moment and trying to organise an event. To me it is THE event that should be happening now. My suggested keynotes would be from the 3 people I think at present have the most potential to shape human evolution: Kofi Anan, Al Gore and Nicholas Negroponte. There would be 6 streams.

One = networks. Networks are the cultural capital of our age. I think the founders of Facebook, MySpace, Blackboard, etc should present on what they have discovered within their networks - the largest human networks ever established.

Two = learning and technology. the governor of Maine on how the project worked there, the constructionist education camp, founders of Google, Wikipedia.

Three = the laptop itself: talks on how it works, issues surrounding distribution, maintenance, long term, Linux, etc etc

Four = UN and Heads of Education. The UN Development team, the Heads of Education from the countries thinking of buying the laptops.

Five = long term. Respected thinkers on social issues and their thoughts on the long term impacts of the project.

Six = innovation: as above, what projects could be worked across this new network? Museums visits, e-mail exchange for languages, etc etc.

This event should be PUBLICISED AND OPEN FOR THE PUBLIC TO ATTEND. Ideally it should find a means of broadcast to as many locations as possible. One of the major advantages of the $100 laptop project is one of its major disadvantages: there is no sales, marketing or research team. That gets the cost down but it means Negroponte's most efficient means of making it happening is to keep discussions to heads of state. None of the people who would be affected by it know about it. The above event should happen whether they end up getting the laptops or not. The success of the project lies as much on implementation as it's technical accomplishment. Sucessful implementation depends to large extent on decent preparation. Preparation is lagging too far behind. I think this event would be the catalyst to start addressing that and move the debate from the technical

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