One Laptop Per Child-Nicholas Negroponte

The big keynote for the conference this year is Nicholas Negroponte and the "$100" laptop. He begins by talking about the project as a journey. Mentions Seymour Papert and his view on students programming and the benefits thereof. Negroponte spends much of his time in underdeveloped countries. Technology isn't about teaching, it's about learning. Introduces the concept of the $100 laptop.
Three basic principles - 1-Use technology to learn learning, not to learn something.
2-Teaching is one but not the only way to achieve learning.
3-Leverage children themselves.
History of his involvement in bringing technology to underdeveloped nations. Started with a few computers in a few locations, then moved to telecommunication(wifi, wimax, etc.) Communication is not a problem today. Project in Cambodia. At the same time Papert worked with the state of Maine on their laptop project. In Maine, they have discovered that teaching and learning is different. What is One Laptop Per Child? 1 - A non-profit entity of $30M funding for non-recurring engineering costs.
2 - About Scale, Scale, scale being global is curcial. Launch 5-10 million in 2007, 50-150 million 2008 > 5 large diverse countries.
3 - To provide to children: to own, to take home, to use seamlessly.
Partners Google, eBay, AMD, News Corp, Brightstar, Marvell, Nortel, Red Hat, 3M, Chi Mei, Quanta, Satellite - TBA, UN, IADB
A lot of laptops. How to get to $100.
•No sales, marketing distribution
•First Purchase Order 5-10M units
•Linux
•Reduce display cost leveraging backlight innovation
500 Mhz AMD x86 processor
128M dRAM
512M Flash
>2 W nominal, can be human powered
3 USB ports
Stereo sound, with 2 audio out
WIFI mesh network
Rugged
Dual mode Display - Spatial Color, Backlit, Transmissive, OLPC LCD Display, Sunlight Readable, Reflective
Camera under consideration
Working model should be on floor shortly Open Source
Skinny Linux
Instant on
Will be faster than your laptop
Parallel Commercial Channels
Whitebox and brands
Private labels
Maintenance by the kids
Design - not cheap, not toy
Color coding of machine for revision purposes. A pivot screen. Crank moved to power supply to reduce wear on the laptop. Part of the Package
$1000 server with 300GB
Inter-school wireless connections Satellite back haul, where needed Mesh
About Launch, global, simultaneous, in quantities of one million each.
Launch countries - Brazil, Nigeria, Thailand, Argentina Central American plan with IADB, In discussion with : China, India, Egypt, Mexico, Bangladesh, Arab League
Why not in the USA?
Buy the $400 Intel Laptop
We do not treat malaria here
Too many school districts
Reverse chain: OLPC's problems are different
Time Line
Nov. 17 Announced WSIS
Dec. 12 Quanta agreed to build
May '06 final country commitments
Q4 '06 developer rollout
Laptop price commitment $100 target price end of 2008, price will float based on : currency, memory, nickel, cobalt. $138 anticipated in 2007 constantly lowering, $50 target price in 2010. Gray market issues - Economics
Initial and launch: Central government funded.
Single order
Susequent
Philanthropic Organizations
Child-to-child funding
Commercial subsidy
One country paying for another
Etc.
Side Effects
Linux on the desktop
No caps lock key
Power conciousness, more human power
No bloated software
stop featuritis
Viral telecommunications
Peer to peer everything
Learning by doing
Contribute ideas to wiki.laptop.org If personally intertested or want a developer board, send e-mails to: iste@laptop.org theeducationalmac necc necc2006