One Laptop Per Child Talks

Nicholas Negroponte presented at Reinventing the Classroom: Social and Educational Impact of Information and Communication Technologies in Education on September 15, 2009

This seminar provided a forum to critically examine: (i) Large scale efforts to incorporate Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) into education; (ii) The impact of these efforts on learning; and (iii) The challenges of evaluation and monitoring.

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Nicholas Negroponte: Well for those of you who know me, you probably saw me squirming in my seat, but I will be very well behaved.

[laughter]

Nicholas: I'd like you to imagine that I told you "I have a technology that is going to change the quality of life." Then I tell you "Really the right thing to do is to set up a pilot project to test my technology. Then the second thing to do is once the pilot has been running for some period of time is to go and measure very carefully the benefits of that technology."

Then I am to tell you that we are going to is very scientifically evaluate this technology, with control groups - giving it to some, giving it to others. This all is very reasonable until I tell you the technology is electricity, and you say "Wait, you don't have to do that."

But you don't have to do that with laptops and learning either. The fact that somebody in the room would say the impact is unclear is to me amazing - unbelievably amazing. There's not a person in this room who hasn't bought a laptop for their child, if they could afford it. You don't know somebody who hasn't done it if they can afford it.

So there's only one question on the table and that's how to afford it? That's the only question. There is no other question - it's just the economics.

Tags: IADB, ICT, Netbooks, Nicholas Negroponte, Reinventing the Classroom, World Bank

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Nicholas Negroponte was interviewed by Riz Khan for AlJazeera's English-language channel on October 4, 2007.

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Riz Khan: Hello and welcome. My guest today has a bit of a problem. He's created a computer at a blockbuster price. For less than $200 US dollars you get a laptop that's Wi-Fi enabled, can be recharged by solar power, has a high-resolution screen, and able to withstand being dropped from up to 5 feet. Sounds perfect, right? The trouble is… In order to be a success it needs the huge global market. And that might just be possible through a new program called "Give One, Get One".

From November 12th for two weeks when someone in the USA or Canada is willing to pay around 400$ for a "green machine", as its called, one will be donated to a needy child in another country. It's a novel idea that's starting to pick up steam. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the "one laptop per child" project, has unveiled his low-cost computer and the World Summit on Information Society, held in Tunis in 2005. Although it was initially ridiculed, his supporters now say, it could become one of the largest laptop players in the United States.

Of course, what do you think of this approach to the digital divide? Don't forget that we take your questions and comments. Just contact the numbers at the bottom of your screen. Nicholas Negroponte joins us now from Boston. Good to have you with us, sir.

Nicholas Negroponte: Happy to be here.

Riz Khan: I gonna start out by asking you where this idea first came from? You'd announced it in 2005. What made you think in the first place "one laptop per child"?

Nicholas Negroponte: Well, the idea actually goes back, I'm embarrassed to say, almost 40 years, where we've been working with children and learning. And in the 1990s we were very interested in connecting children around the world, particularly, the most remote and poorest children. And it was in early 2000, because of some work I've done in Cambodia, that I really sort of made a commitment to work on a one piece that I felt industry wouldn't do, and that was a very low-cost laptop.

Riz Khan: Of course, you've put, essentially It was a very high-profile career at MIT, very much on hold, so to think, to pursue this with quite a passion.

Nicholas Negroponte: Well, my career at MIT helped a great deal, because I knew most of the people in industry, and MIT, being the birthplace of the idea, added a great deal of credibility of it. And, perhaps, more important than anything, we've made a decision two and a half years ago to be a non-profit organization. So, that the moral purpose for doing this was very clear. And that's what attracted a lot of partners and a lot of countries.

Tags: Al Jazeera, Americ, Game Boy, Give One Get One, MIT, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, Riz Khan, Tunis, WSIS

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The concept of creating useful, inexpensive, and sturdy computers for school children in the developing world was initially introduced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in late 2005. Since then, its application in the developing world has seen support, skepticism, and a fast evolution of the aims of the computers and the project "One Laptop per Child."

On May 31, 2007, Nicholas Negroponte presented "The New $100 Computer" to an audience at the World Bank’s Washington offices, explaining the most current work being done by One Laptop Per Child.

Negroponte and Walter Bender entertained questions from the audience around OLPC's application in learning design, project evaluation, how to ally with the education sector to a greater degree, and the Computer’s ground-level maintenance chain.

Below is a transcript of the presentation while the original audio and Negroponte's slides can be found on the World Bank website

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Nicholas Negroponte: The purpose this morning, it's almost afternoon, is to share with you why we're doing the $100 laptop, what we have done, and what we are doing in the next thirty to forty-five days. We're not talking about five year plans anymore.

This is happening right now, and it's interesting to be here at the World Bank because it's a real inflection point for us. I'm pretty good at selling dreams, but I'm not very good at selling laptops. This is not a laptop project, this is an education project, and the key thing that I hope everyone will leave with is that it's a fundamentally different way at looking at learning.

The Media Lab, which I was the director of initially; Walter Bender who's with me and president of One Laptop per Child software and content was the second director of the Media Lab. The two of us took our experiences, in my case, over thirty years of it, working with one particular person named Seymour Papert, whom some of you may know of, or at least historically know of, in an approach to learning which is generally called Constructionist. This is for primary education and, to a lesser extent, secondary education.

I'm just going to run through some slides very quickly and leave most of the time for questions. This is Seymour Papert, by the way, twenty-seven years ago. Before the IBMPC even existed, Steve Jobs gave me a few hundred Apple [tools]. This was outside of Dakar in Senegal. The school is pretty rich, as you can see, but it was still not a private urban school and it was way ahead of its time. It was not connected to the Internet in '82. We were, as individuals, but the school certainly wasn't. What we learned in those very early days in the case of Senegal, Pakistan, and Colombia (those were the three countries we were working in) is that these children play these like pianos.

One of the questions I commonly get is, "Who's going to teach the teachers how to teach the students how to use the computers?" and I wonder what planet that person is on. I truly wonder "where do they come from." I'm sure there's not a person in this room who has a child or a niece or a nephew, but let's say a child, whom that you do not ask for help on your computer or with your cell phone. Including me; I've been doing it all my life. I still ask, or used to ask when my son was home. You always ask children for help.

One of the things it does by the way, because we get criticized for destroying the student-teacher relationship, which is total rubbish. One of the things is when parents ask their children for help, and maybe there are people young enough in this room who were asked by their parents, your relationship with your parents changes. It's kind of a friendship that gets developed, self-esteem on the child's point of view. My relationship to my son was very different than my relationship to my father, partly because of the computer experience and depending on him and asking for his help and so on and so forth. We think, everybody tells me, that the quality of the parent-child relationship doesn't deteriorate. It actually gets better. I think the same thing can happen with students and teachers.

Tags: Constructionist, Infodev, Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, Sesame Street, Walter Bender, World Bank

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Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child, presented the keynote address at this year’s Internet & Society conference, “University - Knowledge Beyond Authority” on May 31 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

The audio podcast of the keynote is transcribed below:

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Welcome everyone and good evening! My name is Colin Maclay, I am the Managing Director of the Berkman Center, and I am thrilled to have you here for this very special event in this very special place, which although I have been around for the last four or five years now, I have never even really heard of before this event happens. So this is a big deal to be in here and our great thanks to the Dean and HLS for allowing us to be here.

So it is my great pleasure to have the honor to introduce to you Nicholas Negroponte who really as they say, needs no introduction, so I will not be tempted to engage in a long one which I list things like "Co-founder of the Media Lab" and author of "Being Digital" and all these things that many of you will be very familiar with. What I would say is that he is, as you know, a big thinker and "big-thinkerness" I think comes in volume as we have seen – not the size of the cranium, but in terms of the size of the ambition in the case of Excel, talking lots of million to start with.

It's big! It didn't surprise, I must confess, because I am harking back to a project that I was involved in with it my colleague, Mike Best, some years ago when we planned to wire an entire district or wireless an entire district in India, something on the order of 2 or three million people, which at that time and probably now would have been the most densely connected real poor place in the world, to which Nicholas said, "dangerously small!"

So this is how he thinks. He thinks big and I think the excitement of that is that it means he thinks big when he thinks about changing education and learning and this project isn't really about the device, so much rather the devices are very nifty, but it is about what it means to learning and what it means to shift the paradigms that we are all so familiar with, particularly those in the developing world.

And I think his participation today is particularly useful in that in some of our discussions earlier this afternoon, we found ourselves coming back time and again to the same old problems we have dealt with respect to copyright, file sharing [indecipherable]: these kinds of issues which comes back and forth within the US that matter, but don't matter quite the same way as they do in developing countries. And what the Excel and OLPC and all the attention and the competition, in fact, which has been so important to this movement, have generated this enthusiasm and this recasting.

I think it should remind us, those of us here, to think about a larger context, to think about the world, to think about not just solving problems in Western Europe and North America, but the impact of technology and learning and everything we do to enable them to be effectively used at a global level. So, with that, I give you, Nicholas, who will speak on the order of 20 minutes and then very generously has consented to do lots of Q&A. Just one word of note, I would say that there is a camera so that if you can stay out of this line, it would be most appreciated. So Nicholas, take it away!

Tags: Being Digital, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC

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Famed reporter Lesley Stahl of CBS News profiled the One Laptop Per Child organization on "60 Minutes" - America's premier new program. She focused on MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte's progress with One Laptop Per Child, his dream of one-to-one computing as an educational boost, a way for children in the developing world to "learn learning".

Ms. Stahl had on-location reports from OLPC testing in Brazil and with 13 million viewers on average, the coverage of OLPC was a major boost in profile for the project.

Below is the transcription of the full 60 Minutes segment. Please acknowledge OLPC Talks if you quote the transcription.

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Leslie Stahl: Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT had a dream, in it every child on the planet had his own a computer. In that way he figured children from the most impoverished places; from desert to jungles and slums could become educated and part of the modern world, poor kids would have new possibilities.

It was a big dream, Negroponte thought he had a chance of actually seeing it happen if he could help invent a really inexpensive laptop. So 2 years ago he founded a non-profit organisation called 'One Laptop per child'. He recruited a cadre of geeks and voila, the $100 laptop, designed specifically for poor children, was born. But let's go back to the beginning when Negroponte first got his idea in Cambodia.

The idea came to him in a remote village, a 4 hour drive on a dirt road from the nearest town, it's as far from MIT as you can get, they don't even have running water. Negroponte and his family founded a school here in 1999, putting in a satellite dish and generators, then they gave the children laptops. Instantly school became a lot more popular.

Child sings: How's the weather? It's sunny.

Leslie Stahl: Kids who had never seen a computer before now crossing the digital divide. Nicholas Negroponte was knocked out.

Nicholas Negroponte:: The first English word of every child in that village was Google.

Leslie Stahl: (Laughs).

Nicholas Negroponte: The village has no electricity, no telephone, no television and the children take home laptops that are connected broadband to the internet.

Leslie Stahl: When they take the laptops home the kids often teach the whole family how to use it

Nicholas Negroponte: Families loved it because it was the brightest light source in the house.

Leslie Stahl: Because they had no electricity.

Nicholas Negroponte: Talk about a metaphor and reality simultaneously - it just illuminated that household.

Teacher: We have to go to study computer now, yes? Good.

Children: Yes!

Leslie Stahl: Once the computers were there, school attendance went way up.

Nicholas Negroponte: This year, for example, 50% more children showed up for first grade.

Leslie Stahl: In Cambodia?

Nicholas Negroponte: Yeah, because the kids who were there last year told the other kids "You know, school is pretty cool."

Tags: $100 Laptop, 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child

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On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

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Nicholas Negroponte, President, One Laptop Per Child: We have a bunch of small device manufacturers lining up to license this for general market use elsewhere.

New Speaker: Do you mean, people want to use it commercially?

Negroponte: Sure. We get asked about a commercial machine, I want to say, daily, and we are staying out of it for the time being because unless it really leverages, and generates more machines for the kids, we don’t want to do it. We want to be clear about our purpose. If we were to give it to somebody and say, “Give us 15% of the revenues,” it’s too small. It’s not big enough…It doesn’t help us launch. Once we’re launched we will think about all sorts of things. If we do buy two and get one in some commercial basis, that’s 100% profit, if you will. That’s always at the back of our mind.

New Speaker: Given the pricing on devices like the N77A or the Nokia 800, you know, which are the tablet devices which don’t have a keyboard, they are a lot more limited in terms of capabilities and most usually retail between $350 and $400. I think that the double price is imminently realistic given the… It’s really the capabilities of the device and also the comparative pricing on other… I mean, that’s not a competing device. It’s very much apples and oranges but I sure don’t think it’s out of the realm that people would pay that.

Negroponte: I think a $300 version of this would fly, especially if you knew when you were buying one, you were buying one for another kid as well. No trouble with the pricing. We just haven’t done that. It’s attractive.

New Speaker: But you’re saying you were talking about kids in the U.S. You’re seriously considering a $300 version, but that’s different from a commercial version from the way you think. Correct?

Negroponte: Yes, it’s different, because with kids in the United States that back off from the $300, you’ve started squeezing them.

New Speaker: Oh, you would? So you wouldn’t charge $300 for that?

Negroponte: I’d have to agonize over it. In other words…

New Speaker: How low would you go if the governor started squeezing you? [laughter]

Negroponte: Wasn’t it George Bernard Shaw who asked the beautiful girl if she would sleep with him for a million dollars and she said, “yes,” and then he said “would you sleep with me for a dollar. Now what do you think I am?” [laugher] We established that in the first question. I’ll do a lot of things for big money. So if big numbers are offered, and governors offer us large numbers, I will readjust my thinking, especially if it’s for kids.

New Speaker: So somewhere between $300 and $175?

Negroponte: Yes. It’s volume priced.

Tags: $100 Laptop, Internet Connectivity, Mesh Network, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, OLPC WiFi

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On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

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Nicholas Negroponte, President, One Laptop Per Child: We have had, at the last count, 25 countries. Is it about 25? There have been latecomers surprise us. And they were divided into families Monday, which are the 7 countries working with us since the beginning, and then sort of what we have arrogantly called the "accession countries" to the EU coming here on Tuesday, and then they've been together on Wednesday and this morning and some of them are staying, so we had a very intense week.

The reason we're doing this meeting is that we did not anticipate changing the industry. That was not our purpose, to launch "One Laptop Per Child" in order to change the way people thought of computers or the way people develop software, or push one particular direction versus another. But clearly the project has had a pretty big influence on the industry.

The fact that Microsoft dropped Windows [$3...?] a few days ago is actually very intimately related to OLPC. And since we had not ever talked to analysts in an organized way, and we have seen some people making statements in the community that are just wrong, we figured we would devote the time mostly to Q&A. There's so much press on this project, we almost don't have to initiate [noise] heard about it. So what I'm going to do is not take an hour at all. I'm going to march through very quickly some of the introductory remarks that I normally bank in about 15 minutes, and then really use as much time as possible for Q&A.

And there's our opening slide, I guess. Excuse me for talking to the side, but I don't want to have that light in my face. One Laptop Per Child, as a *concept* really goes back to 1968, when a professor named Seymour Packard made a very simple observation, and was that children learned learning when they were involved with computer programming, that it was actually the closest that a child could come to thinking about thinking, when he wrote a program to do something he learned about that something in a more fundamental way, and then when the program didn't work, then you debug it and the process of debugging was a very fundamental way of thinking about thinking, and this sounds very abstract.

Tags: $100 Laptop, Constructionism, Mitt Romney, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, Quanta Computer, Red Hat

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On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

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Nicholas Negroponte, President, One Laptop Per Child

Negroponte: September 20th it starts, then a break, then it ramps pretty quickly up. Currently it's scheduled to ramp up almost immediately to 400,000 a month.

Question: Would that price go down if more countries said yes?

Negroponte: Insignificantly. And the reason is Quanta is such a big player, they've got their suppliers ready to give them the large number price on most things?

Question: So they've already squeezed most of the..

Negroponte: So we've.. yes, I think it will go down, but not as much as you would think at the beginning.

Question: You mentioned too that, like you said, 30 to 100 days..

Negroponte: Yes. The 100-day is to accommodate countries who by law have to issue a bid, a tender. They have to issue the tender within the 30 days, but then they're given within the 100 minus 30, the 70 remaining days to sort of basically close the bid.

We're assuming that if someone else wins the bid, more power to them, because then, that's why it's 100 versus the 30. It's the bid versus the non-bid situation.

Question: I've just got a question about this whole process. I know you've been doing these tests but.. and Quanta has a lot of experience manufacturing computers, there's no doubt about that. But, you're sort of the Hewlett-Packard, or the Dell, or the Apple. When Sony started making computers they did not start mass-producing this quickly, nothing as ambitious as you're doing.

So, I guess what I'm wondering is, why aren't you worried about quality control? Why aren't you doing this more slowly? To me it doesn't seem that prudent. What am I missing here? It just seems like if I were in a business school class and we were looking at this, someone would say: "Well, isn't there going to be a problem down the road? If they are going to have so many laptops out there and there is a mistake, how are they going to load the BIOS and who is going to do the support and aren't they going to discover problems in the first year or so?"

Negroponte: First of all, let me tell you that I asked that exact same question. And their response to me.. Quanta's Their response to me was: "Don't worry about the numbers. This is a very simple laptop. It's got less than 1/3 of the parts of a normal laptop. We've been testing the hell out of it. We're baking it, shaking it, dropping it, doing all the rest. Don't worry.

Tags: $100 Laptop, Constructionist, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, One to One Computing

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At DLD (Digital, Life, Design), Europe's "conference for the 21st century" at HVB Forum in Munich, Germany, Negroponte spoke in the panel "How to Be Good" on his views on the world's children:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's "Digital Life Design: How to be good" panel discussion.

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Martin Varsavsky: So tonight is the start of my career as a moderator and interviewer. I have done too many panels and I thought it would be interesting to interview other people and to see what they had to say about how to be good. It thing being good is hard. Just ask Bill Gates about how hard it is to be good.

It's an endeavor; it takes a lot of work. I think people are trying to be good - many times they harm, and that's whey even when you sign the Hippocratic Oath you say that you are not going to harm. Obviously most doctors thought that they were going to do good. I think that doing good requires strategy. We're going to hear about three strategies here that, in my opinion, work out to a good example of what it is to do good. Our panelists - I prefer that they introduce themselves, so I'm going to start by a brief introduction by each one.

We're going to have each panelist introduce themselves. We're going to go from left to right here so we're going to start with Steve. I also understand that Steve has a short video to show. I hope that it works. So, why don't you please introduce yourselves, let's get started with Steve, and then we'll go into a Q & A that will first involve myself and then all of you. So please Steve, go ahead.

Steve Mariotti: [Walks up to podium] Hello, can you hear me? Good! I'm so glad to be here today. I wanted to tell you that for the last 26 years I've been working on how to teach low-income children how to set up small business. Today I just want to show you a real quick (it's about 2 minutes) video - but it will save me a lot of time if I show that. So, I'll go to the video.

Tags: Digital Life Design, Good Bin Laden, Martin Varsavsky, Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child

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In July 2006, Nicholas Negroponte, spoke at the 2006 NECC Conference with Chris Walsh about One Laptop Per Child.

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's interview at the National Educating Computer Conference (NECC):

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Chris Walsh: Hi, this is Chris Walsh with NECC Live--special edition of NECC Live--here in San Diego, California. We just happen to have a opportunity to talk to Dr. Nicholas Negroponte from the “One Laptop per Child Initiative.” Thank you for hopping on! You just finished your keynote, I'm sure it was to thunderous applause. But, everybody here is all a buzz about the One Laptop per Child. Tell us just a little bit about what inspired the initiative.

Dr. Negroponte: Well, we've been working on the use of computers to learn learning for about 35 years. This is not a new project at all. And...we've been working in developing nations for about the past 20-25 years. And...what we think the time is right for—we couldn't have done it a couple of years ago, we can do it now—is to provide every child with a laptop so the one on one experience, as well as a seamless one at home, at school, making it part of your life for music, for games, for doing everything from homework to...what we would call “constructionist software” that the time is right. And, if you look globally, there are, in rough numbers, a billion children.

Chris Walsh: Throughout the world, we're not just talking developing nations.

Dr. Negroponte: Right. In rough numbers, it's a billion children in primary or secondary school; half of them are in rural remote places with no electricity. Typically, a rural school in a poor country has well-meaning teachers, but they maybe have a sixth grade education. School is maybe two and a half hours a day because there are two shifts; they don't really start on time...they kind of end early. It's not something you can just solve by teacher training...building a few more schools...you've got to leverage the children. If you're going to make a change that's going to have an effect in the next five years, the only solution is to leverage the children themselves. So the idea behind “One Laptop per Child” is to get the children to be able to do things we would call “constructionism.” But inside school, outside school, peer to peer, communicating with other children and basically using education as the long-term solution to economic development which in turn leads to everything from world peace to a better environment.

Chris Walsh: So this is a bold initiative obviously, that's why it gets so much press. You've got lots of skeptics out there talking about the technology--pieces of it, talking about the dollar amount, talking about the impact that it could actually have. What do you say to all those skeptics out there about why this should be done and why it can be done?

Dr. Negroponte: There are very few skeptics that are deeply skeptical except for self-interest. Yes, it's a little bit at the edge...we're probably a little early. A hundred dollars is too expensive for most places.

Tags: Chris Walsh, National Educational Computing Conference, NECC, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC

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In July 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the OAS Lecture Series of the Americas on One Laptop Per Child and shared his vision and his efforts to revolutionize education worldwide.

Below is the transcript of Negroponte's presentationwith Moderator Irene Klinger, Director, Department of External Relations and Coordinator of the Lecture Series:

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Okay. I'm going to use about 30 minutes to do 3 things: Tell you sort of why we're doing what we're doing, tell you how we're doing it and what we're doing, and then use the end of it to tell you exactly where we are. Now the people in this room will have the benefit of the images over there, and people who are looking at the web cast, unfortunately, will not have those pictures, so I may use extra words to describe what the pictures are. And maybe we could ask the audio visuals to put the first picture instead of the last picture on the screen so we can start at the beginning.

This project is about learning, not about laptops. And that is perhaps the hardest thing I have when I travel around the world bragging because all too long people think that this organization is selling laptops and we are indeed distributing a huge number of laptops, but the purpose is education. And the reason that we do that is very simple.

No matter what global problem you are dreading, whether it's the elimination of poverty, whether it's the creation of peace, whether its solving environmental energy problems, the solution- whatever it is- multiple solutions, the solutions always include education, never is without an education component and sometimes cannot be done without education. And if you look around the world you must remember there is not one decent education system in primary and secondary school. And in rough numbers half of those girls lived in the rural part of very poor countries and in rural countries the education is generally poor because teachers who have been trained literally have no interest, and in going back into rural parts of the country.

So when we decided we would look at how we will proceed, we decided to look at the heart of it all- the younger children of children and poor kids. And we looked at it from the point of view of learning learning, not learning something. And there is actually a profound difference. I spent a lot of time in rural parts of the world, remote places that don't even have a road. And You'll find a school where somebody has got two or three desktops that are connected to a battery or generator. They have it all set up which is very hardcore, until you look at what they're doing.

They're teaching the kids excel and word, and it's heartbreaking because why would kids learn excel and word. Teachers are thinking this will help the kids get a job in the city when they grow up. That's right. The children should be making things. The children should be writing computer programs. They should be learning by doing. The thing is not to learn excel or such programs it is to learn to learn. And my team has been doing this for many years.

In fact this goes back to 1982 in Senegal where we do things with computers with children in school for the IBM. And the person whose name is just right down the book on red is Seymour Papert. And Seymour's experience are the very roots of everything. And what Seymour observed in the late 60's and early 70's, in fact on April 11 1970, the first group of patients, a very large public one, called teach your children.

Tags: Nicholas Negroponte, OAS Lecture Series, One Laptop Per Child, School Districts, Seymour Papert, Suburban Massachusetts

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In July 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the OAS Lecture Series of the Americas on One Laptop Per Child and shared his vision and his efforts to revolutionize education worldwide.

The transcript of Negroponte's question and answer session with Moderator Irene Klinger, Director, Department of External Relations and Coordinator of the Lecture Series:

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Modertor: Thank you. Thank you very much Mr. Negroponte for a very interesting and thought provoking presentation to bring information and communication technologies to our children in the Americas and also in the World. I would now like to open the floor to questions from here and from our audience around the Americas. I know there is interest already.

I was told by Antigua and Barbuda, the minister of information is gathering with the chamber of commerce and some authorities there and they will post a question pretty soon. I also received a question from Chile already and I see ambassador Alvarez already with his hand up. Ambassador Alverarez, and we will take a few questions from the field and also from the audience here.

Question: Mr. Negroponte thank you so much for your presentation. A question, how do you teach teachers to teach thinking in developing countries through a medium that is absolutely foreign to them? That is one and two: what can an organization such as the OAS do to participate in your project? Thank you.

Answer: We find that in the case of teaching teachers the most important thing to do is to give them sufficient self confidence to allow themselves to be taught by the children. That is the key.

Tags: Antigua, Barbuda, Irene Klinger, Nicholas Negroponte, OAS Lecture Series, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child

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In December 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at NetEvents Press Summit with a keynote presentation: No Lap Un-Topped - The Bottom Up Revolution That Could Re-define Global IT Culture

The transcript of Negroponte's speech:

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Well, thank you very much. I'm going to use the next 35 minutes, maybe 40, to describe, as thoroughly as possible, not just the $100 laptop, but also some of the impacts that it could have on the industry. And no matter what I say, you're all going to forget one thing and that is that this is not a laptop project. This is an education project. And I'm so passionate about the laptop - I actually have one with me and it works, it's the first one off the assembly line - I'm so passionate about the laptop and start talking about it, that I even sometimes forget myself.

But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education. In some cases, it could be just with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we particularly focus on primary education. What happens when children start to go to school and just get the opportunity to learn learning itself. So I'm going to show you some slides, talk about this and share with you, as I said, what I think it might also do to the industry.

A lot of people say, "When did you get this idea?" Well, this particular slide is 1982, outside of Decar, before the IBM PC existed actually on the market of Eastern Europe, and Steve Jobs gave me some Apple Twos. Seymour Papert, a name I'll refer to several times, and I were working on the provision to children, a language called Logo, in developing countries.

10 years before that, actually 15 years before that, Seymour, still at MIT or at least having just arrived at MIT, came up with a very simple observation and that is that when children write computer programs about something like drawing a circle, they have to understand the concept of circleness a lot more than if they just read about it in the text book or somebody describes it on a blackboard. And for those of you who have written computer programs, you know that in fact, the first time you write it, it has bugs. And that when you de-bug a program, you are actually performing a set of operations that is the closest you can get to thinking about thinking.

Tags: Circleness, Jeff Bezos, NetEvents, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, Seymour Papert

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In November 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at Forrester's Consumer Forum outlining OLPC's progress, the obstacles they've faced, and the promise of connecting children all over the world.

The transcript of Negroponte's speech:

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Intro: One Laptop Per Child is the non-profit organization shared by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte is on leave of absence from MIT to help the organization redesign the laptop computer and make the machines available to children in impoverished countries around the world. Negroponte spoke to the Forrester Consumer Forum on October 25th about using technology to empower the masses. His speech was followed by a Q&A conducted by Forrester Vice President Josh Bernoff.

Nicholas Negroponte: Thank you very much. Um, I'm going to use about 15 minutes to uh, describe the project and then I gather there's a Q&A session, um, and the Q&A session to me is the most important part. So for these 15 minutes, which is in some sense the entertainment portion of your day because it will not relate directly to what you're doing but it certainly will relate to the lives of your children and your grandchildren.

And if you think of any big problem, think of ones that are so big we don't even do anything except talk about them as individuals and often as organizations, um, whether it's something like peace or something like eliminating poverty or saving the environment or doing those big things. Whatever the solutions, and there's always an "s," may be, they include education, in some cases it can be done just with education, and in no case that I've ever come across can it be done without some element of education. And if you take that as a given, and then you look at the world, there are about 1.2 billion children in what we call primary and secondary schools.

Roughly 50% of them do not have electricity, roughly 50% and not exactly the same ones, but very, very much overlapping um, live in rural remote parts of the world. Uh, it might interest you that almost 50% of them are in China and India alone. Uh there's some startling facts, and if you look at the world and say "Well, what if we could provide to those children what we have enjoyed in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, so on, what could we do to make that happen?" Now some people will tell you that the thing to do is to train teachers, to build schools, to make curricula better, to make sort of the current education system better, and in no way, for those of you who are blogging at the moment please underline this, in no way are we saying don't do that, stop doing that, teachers aren't important, schools aren't good.

What we're saying is that that method like building roads, pouring concrete, and doing all of those things is going to take a very long time. It's going to take years and years. So is there something we can do in the meantime, something to, in fact, leverage the children themselves? That doesn't mean every child is an Abraham Lincoln, it doesn't mean that, you know, you just put it on autopilot and you send laptops to kids in the jungle and it happens by itself. But is there a way of thinking not about learning as it comes from teaching, but learning as it comes from the way most of you have learned most of the things you know. In fact, everybody in this room learned how to walk, learned how to talk, and learned a great deal of the common sense you currently have without a walking teacher, without a talking teacher, and without somebody who taught you about common sense.

How did you learn those things? You learned them by interacting with the environment. As a young baby it was a real reward for the investment that you made to learn how to talk because you could get something, learn how to walk because you could stand up and reach it, and that whole very interactive process where you, in fact, get something very immediately by learning and interacting and so on, comes to a more or less abrupt halt at the age of 6. When you're told "Go to school," and for the next 12 years if you're really lucky actually, but for the next 12 years you will be learning by being taught by people like me, standing in front of a room, or books, but the process is teaching. Now, that's ok, and again, please, I'm not saying don't do that, I'm saying that that's one form of learning.

Tags: Forrester Consumer Forum, Nichols Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, Seymour Papert

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In May 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) about One Laptop Per Child during his keynote speech.

Nicholas Negroponte's presentation video:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's speech:

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(music in the background)Nicholas Negroponte: (walks on stage) (laughs) OK. OK, now we're really going to talk about MIT. I'm going to use the few minutes I have to tell you what we're doing, which is called One Laptop Per Child. And this is a project that started about thirty years ago. So let me go to the first slide which amongst other things welcomes Intel to the low-cost laptop world.

The reason we started One Laptop Per Child was to address: " How do you get to every child on the planet a laptop and access to the internet?". And I can't tell you how many times, cause I've spent about a third or more of my life now in the developing world. You go to a place and it may not even be accessible by automobiles. You may even have to walk some of it to get there. You find an entrepreneurial person in the school systems and never be without some component that includes education.

And if you look around the planet, there are about a billion kids. Half a billion kids live in rural areas and many of that half are in such poor conditions that it's not just that the village that's poor, but it also means the teachers themselves may have a sixth grade education. They could be loving, they could be caring, they could sing songs, they can discipline. They can do all of those things, but you can't just teach teachers. You can't solve the worlds problems by building more schools and teaching more teachers because it's going to take forever. You've got to leverage the children.

Children are absolutely extraordinary at learning. You take any child, from any part of the world and you give them a Gameboy and you give them the brand new box. The first thing they do is throw away the manual and the second thing they do is they use it. And they can use it. Adults will say that it's genetic "How can they use it?" Well you're damn right they can use it and we have to be able to leverage that in their own learning. So this goes back to the theories of a man named Seymour Papper. We started. This goes back to the late sixties. Seymour is alive and well and very active in One Laptop Per Child today. His theories of learning were very simple. He said the best way to learn about learning is to write computer programs.

Tags: Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child, WCIT, World Congress on Information Technology

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In February 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference annual event, where leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration.

Also in attendance was Wil Shipley, founder and CEO of Delicious Monster who has a humoours introduction to Negroponte on the flight in.

Negroponte's presentation video:

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's speech:

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Ted talks are recorded live at the TED conference and produced with WNYC New York public radio. This episode features Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Hundred Dollar Laptop Initiative. TED talks are made possible through the support of BMW, where ideas are everything. Here's Nicholas Negroponte.

(applause)

Nicholas Negroponte: I'm not sure why I'm the patron saint, and I was also trying to figure out why I was in the history section. It's because of age. I've been at MIT for 44 years. I knew Ricky Werman or I've known Ricky Werman for 40 years. I went to TED one, there's only one other person here I think who did that. There's a likeness between what I did at TED one in the early 80s and what I am going to do today and that is talk about something I'm doing. All of the other TEDs, and I went to them all under Ricky's regime, I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. And if you read the press, it actually last week said I quit the media lab. I didn't quit the media lab, I stepped down as chairman, which is kind of a ridiculous title. But some someone else has taken it on, and one of the things that you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor.

I will now do for the rest of my life the one laptop per child which I have sort have been doing for a year and a half anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why I'm doing it, how we're doing it and what we are doing. At some point I will even pass around what the hundred-dollar laptop might be like. I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues so I thought I would talk about the three that at least drove me to do this. The first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state and you say what is your most precious natural resource they will not say children at first, and then when you say children they will pretty quickly agree with you. So that isn't very hard. Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education, and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it. The third is a little less obvious. That is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something or be able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen from teaching, whether it's people standing up like I'm doing now, or through a book or something. But it was really through teaching.

Tags: Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Hundred Dollar Laptop, TED Conference, TEDTalks, Wil Shipley

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In January 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke to the World Economic Forum about "the $100 laptop of Nicholas Negroponte".

Nicholas Negroponte's interview

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's interview:

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Loïc Le Meur (host): Good morning. I have the great honor to be today with Nicholas Negroponte, who is the founding chairman of the MIT Media Lab and of One Laptop per Child. Hello Nicholas.

Nicholas Negroponte (guest): Hello.

Le Meur: Will you allow me to call you Nicholas?

Negroponte: Please.

Le Meur: For our podcasts we are trying to be more, you know, kind of friendly. Thank you very much for taking the time. Could you tell us a bit about your one hundred dollar PC that I should talk- I should call One Laptop per Child for the World Economic Forum blog?

Negroponte: Well, first of all, it's a hundred dollar laptop, not just a hundred dollar PC, and embedded in the concept of a laptop is the degree of mobility that will allow children to use the digital world in a much more seamless fashion, instead of going to school and finding a few machines or laptops in a special room or in the back of the classroom. We look at One Laptop per Child as a complete change in how learning takes place. And the seamlessness of it is very important.

Now, what we have done is we have found ways to bring the cost down, that we can sell the laptops to governments at cost. We're a nonprofit organization, so this is- Immediately, 50 to 60 percent of the cost of a normal laptop is gone because we really don't have distribution, sales, marketing and profit. It's really done by a single sale to a ministry of education in the first year in quantities of a million, so you launch seven to ten million in the first year, which, by the way, will start roughly a year from now. That brings down the price so far down, the combination of those two events, not having sales, marketing, distribution, and having very large numbers, that smaller companies, smaller countries, smaller school systems can then participate.

Le Meur: And how do you- how did you have this idea? Because usually people think about the internet being also, you know, a way of pushing globalization. So, I understand here the internet and globalization can also be used to bridge the digital divide and help those developing countries, so how did you- You know, did you wake up up one day with this idea of a challenge of giving a laptop to every child?

Tags: $100 Laptop, Globalization, Loïc Le Meur, Nicholas Negroponte, World Economic Forum

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In September 2005, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at MIT World about "The Hundred Dollar Laptop-Computing for Developing Nations".

Nicholas Negroponte's presentation video

The transcript of Nicholas Negroponte's speech:

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Jason Pontin, introduction: Welcome to the American Technologists Conference here at MIT. Over the next two days you will see dozens of the most exciting emerging technologies. And panelists and speakers will explain to you why they matter. I hope there will be a great deal of informed and vigorous debate. I would like to begin by thanking our partners and sponsors: the government of Spain, and Accenture, and Penton, who helps us put on this conference every year. I actually won't be your master of ceremonies for the next few days. That job is our editor-at-large Bob Buderi and I'm going to hand it over to Bob who will tell you a bit about today's event. Thank you all very much for coming and I hope you have a great event. Thank you.

Bob Buderi, introduction: Thank you, thank you Jason and welcome again to all of you. We really appreciate you coming out. We think we have a great two days for you. As you know when we explore emerging technologies it's not just about the new technologies that are coming down the pike, but why they matter, how they will affect business, society and personal lives. The United States especially has succeeded so well in past years, for decades, because of the incredible mix of this innovation machine from venture capital to start-up opportunities to education systems to big companies to the government's role.

All these views and roles will be represented over these two days. So to start things off, we're going to introduce our first speaker, Nicholas Negroponte, who has played a pioneering role himself in the digital age. The founding chairman of the MIT Media Lab that began early investigations into things like digital graphics, personalized news, types of interfaces such as voice or gesture recognition, and a wealth of areas that have been copied on, built on, enhanced literally around the world. Now Nicholas has applied his energies to bringing the digital age to emerging nations with his $100 laptop project. When I contacted him to ask him to come speak he said it was perhaps the most important thing he had worked on in his life. So without further ado, let me bring up Nicholas Negroponte.

Nicholas Negroponte: Thank you. It is the most important thing I've ever done in my life. It's also the first project in my life where the elevator story is 20 seconds. The reception it's received worldwide has been absolutely incredible. And the press has ... there hasn't been one bad word. So if there's any press in this room, maybe you could keep it that way.

Tags: Bob Buderi, Jason Pontin, MIT World, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child

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