15th September 2006

Interview with Nicholas Negroponte

posted in 1:1, edtech, leadership |

Nicholas Negroponte is one of my favorite thinkers about digital literacy (as the author of the 1995 book “Being Digital”) as well as a practical evangelist for the transformation of teaching and learning through the lever offered by 1:1 technologies (now via OLPC.) I was delighted to find this evening on the Internet Archive an interview with Dr. Negroponte from 2002, broadcast in two parts. (Part 1 and Part 2) As the founder of the MIT Media Lab, Negroponte has done as much or more than anyone that I have heard of to promote the causes of digital literacy and innovative uses of technology in educational and other contexts. Anyone who helped create Lego Mindstorms is a hero in my book!

This really caught my attention tonight because I was quoting Negroponte in a new article I am finishing for School Library Journal on “The Ethic of Open Digital Content.” I wrote a bit about these ideas in the post, “Open Content and Open Source Tools” a couple of weeks ago. The quotation I’m using is:

The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital world, that future is driven almost 100 percent by the ability of that company’s product or services to be rendered in digital form.

Our future is digital. Are you still teaching analog? Teach digital! (To quote Maria Henderson, who owns the domain name iteachdigital.com!) :-)
As an interesting aside, I learned this summer that John Negroponte is the elder brother of Nicholas. Now those are a pair of amazing siblings!

On this day..

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  1. 1 On September 15th, 2006, links for 2006-09-16 — Constructictism Archive said:

    [...] Moving at the Speed of Creativity » Blog Archive » Interview with Nicholas Negroponte Negoponte - $100 laptop and all that… (tags: ALASdivide negroponte MIT) [...]