No Child Left Offline

Here's the 21st century version of a chicken in every pot: a laptop for every child. Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT professor, is founder of One Laptop Per Child, an international non-profit that created the XO laptop, a durable machine that began mass production in November and is designed for kids in the world's poorest and most remote regions. If nothing else, Negroponte has proven that no grand vision goes unpunished. Last fall a BusinessWeek writer panned the program in a column titled, "It's Time To Call One Laptop Per Child A Failure." The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story under the headline, "How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants." And it's not just the press. Negroponte has sparred with critics such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Craig Barnett of Intel. His testy relationship with Intel briefly turned into an uneasy-alliance but blew up this month when, Negroponte says, an Intel salesperson tried to convince the government of Peru to scrap its deal with OLPC and instead buy the company's competing laptop, the Intel Classmate. Intel has blamed the split on "philosophical" differences. Negroponte presses on.

Why spend so much time and effort on laptops instead of basic human necessities like food, shelter, and peace?

Substitute the word "education" for the word "laptop" above and you will not ask again.

OLPC has a wiki in 20 languages with 4,442 pages, and 2,000 files and 2,000 registered contributors. Has this global community helped shape your project?

You bet they have. One "kid" suggested no Caps Lock key and we took his advice. Collaboration and open source are at the root of everything we do.

What's wrong with a Caps Lock key?

Most people hit the caps lock key by accident. It is particularly likely since it is close to the "a" (often used in English and Latin languages) and just above the "shift," itself an act of making uppercase. I am willing to bet that 99 percent of the world's users spend time deleting uppercase letters that have inadvertently appeared because they accidentally hit "caps lock."

You've said this is an education project, not a laptop project. What do you mean?

The goal is providing the opportunity for children to learn. What makes the laptop so suitable is the constructionist approach on which we are built. Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation. We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards. At about the age six, we are told to stop learning that way and, instead, to do most of our learning by being told, by books or teachers, on a basis of, "Trust us (adults). It will be good for you." The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Have you seen this work?

We have seen it work all over the place: Cambodia, Costa Rica, Brazil, just to name a few. In one school, 100 percent more kids showed up for 1st grade the next year. They were not coming from the neighboring village. No. What happened is that the six-year-olds in school told those who were not that school is cool.

What do you hope will be different with kids who use these laptops?

That they keep the passion for learning, the passion that all children have when they start school.

Computers can also be great time wasters: some kids spend vast amounts of time on games, surfing the net and downloading music.

Kids should play games, download music, chat with each other. They should think of the tools for those as exactly the same tools for "school." Learning is not limited to teaching. I am always amazed when parents ask me the above in reference to their own child spending too much time with electronic games, for example. The same parents would be delighted to have their child practice the piano eight hours a day. The truth is a child should not spend eight hours a day doing anything. The job description of a child is to do many things.

Why the insistence on open source?

Because sharing and collaboration are very important pieces of education. We think that computer programming itself is an important part of "learning (about) learning." Our keyboard even has a "view source" key that you can hit and to see the source code of what you are running.

Most computers have been designed for a very different sort of user than the ones you are aiming for. What has OLPC done differently?