According to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality,” the MIT Media lab and major corporate sponsors like Google, Advanced Micro Devices, Red Hat, News Corp and Brightstar are making excellent headway in prototype development for the $100 laptop project. Tomorrow in Tunisia, MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte will be briefing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and others on the project at a technology conference.
If anyone knows or finds podcasts of this event, please let me know by commenting here or emailing me. This is a very exciting project with huge implications for education around the globe, and educators need be following this.
I was interested to read that Steve Jobs of Apple Computer offered to provide free copies of Macintosh OS X for the project. I am not surprised Negroponte turned him down– he reported in October MIT is developing “skinny Linux” to run on the laptops which requires less memory than the current Linux distributions– but this was still a great offer. Interesting but not surprising we haven’t heard of a similar offer from Microsoft….. If Mac OS X can run on these laptops, by all means I hope people will be given that option down the road. Further market penetration of open source solutions including the Linux operating system in educational spheres and elsewhere will continue to challenge existing technology companies to further define their market niches. For consumers, taxpayers, educators and students, this is a good thing.
This statement from the article is amazing, but in line with previous comments published elsewhere:
Although no contracts with governments have been signed, Mr. Negroponte says current plans call for producing five to ten million units beginning in late 2006 or early 2007, with tens of millions more a year later.
This laptop initiative is going to further drive home the point that we are living in a web 2.0 world. The Internet is increasingly the platform for content development and distribution. This is very exciting, but also very disruptive (potentially) for many traditional organizations. And for traditional mindsets about things like….. education. This laptop project is one of the digital definers of the new teacher education.
This comment from the article is also very interesting:
He [Negraponte] also says Microsoft, which is a financial contributor to MIT and a backer of its Media Lab, has undergone a change in attitude about the $100 laptop. “Their first reaction was to laugh at the idea, then the next reaction was kind of antagonistic,” he says. “Recently, they’re very friendly.”
Microsoft’s Mr. Mundie says he wasn’t aware of any antagonism, adding, “At the end of the day, I think we have fundamentally the same objectives that the Media Lab project has relative to the kids.” And Mr. Negroponte, after meeting with Mr. Gates, now says, “The machine will run anything, including Windows.”
The key here is choice. We should be allowed to CHOOSE our operating system, not have it mandated to us by some corporation or conglomerate of financial interests. Have you used Linux? I have, and not just as the underpinnings of the Mac I regularly use. Linux is amazing. Fast, stable, fully featured. Powerful and free. You think Microsoft is “on the same page” with MIT about that? I don’t think so. They are a corporation, focused on quarterly profits, as all corporations are. They are not about giving things away. At least, I haven’t seen Microsoft have this focus up till now. But people can change… and maybe even corporations. Time will tell.
We live an exciting day, folks. If you are interested, I track this issue (“laptop initiative”) with a free Technorati “watch list” that you can access and use if desired too.
On this day..
- Reasons to Invest in Education - 2011
- 3 External Microphone Options for iPads (Nov 2011) - 2011
- Captions and Cross-References for Automatic Page Numbers in MS Word - 2011
- Pennsylvania Newspaper Article / School Tech Director Misrepresents CIPA - 2011
- Ready for the Creativity World Forum #cwf2010 - 2010
- Learning about the amazing iOS Square Credit Card solution - 2010
- Remembering the amazing Grape iMac: 266 mHz with a 6 GB Hard Drive - 2010
- Accessing the web where URL shorteners don't work? Problem solved with Untiny - 2009
- Branching surveys and self-grading quizzes in Google Forms / Google Docs - 2009
- Ustream chat moderation lessons and Coursecasting opinions - 2008
