Laptop has been eaten. Now what?

Are you weirded out by the fact that an 11 year old owns a cell phone? So by that same train of thought you would be just as weirded out by the concept of One Laptop Per Child. As I was reading the reading (LOL) for this week, I found this concept by Negroponte very bizarre and slightly unnerving.

This could severely impact the social and cultural aspect of a child’s life especially for children growing up in Third World Countries who are not used to a lot of technology in everyday life. I grew up in the Philippines so I know what it’s like to not have technology at the press of your fingertips and we used to make up our own games to pass times. As for education, I believe schooling is the most effective tool for a child’s learning and so I agree with Brian Winston’s stance that is slightly against Negroponte’s vision.

Though if you were to look at it from a different perspective, this could be just Nicholas Negroponte’s way of trying to help shape the world through technology. As there are a lot of organizations out there, such as World Vision (http://www.wvi.org) and Oxfam (http://www.oxfam.org) , who help children that are worse off with basic necessities like water, food, shelter and schooling.

You can’t help but be slightly cynical and critical about Negroponte’s vision for the 2 billion children out there in the world. Questions arise on how are these Third World Countries are going to find a power source to run these laptops let alone finding a decent and constant water supply. I think for electricity is my biggest issue with these laptops. Winston quoted Bill Gates in the reading in which Gates was more worried about how certain countries were going to supply the energy as a normal laptop would take about 20-30 watts to run within a few minutes and a child in a Third World Country could only handle 5-6 watts. It just seems odd to supply kids between the ages of 6-12 (I mean c’mon SIX-YEARS-OLD) with technology laden instruments and expect them to learn this way. Maybe I’m a little old fashioned but a lot of people in tutorial found this solution very odd indeed.

If I had to make the world a better place, laptops for kids would not be my ideal solution. Even that phrase, laptops for kids, and associating laptops with children boogles my mind!