IntroductionRemarksQuestions and AnswersIntroduction
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Last year we marked
the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Hans
Morgenthau, born in 1904 in Coburg, Germany.
We also marked the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Carnegie Council,
born in 1914, in Andrew Carnegie's living room on Fifth Avenue.
As I mentioned last year, it is worth considering just how and why Carnegie
and Morgenthau became linked. They are certainly a most unlikely pair—Carnegie,
the great industrialist and philanthropist, the bobbin boy who rose from the
factory floor to become the great titan of the U.S. Steel Corporation. By the
time of his death in 1919, Carnegie was known as the richest man in the world,
and also the most generous.
Morgenthau, the quintessential scholar, teacher, public intellectual, author
of the textbook on international relations. Politics among Nations was its title, first published in
1948 and reprinted in seven editions over a span of over fifty years. By the
time of his death in 1980, Professor Morgenthau was known not only as a
preeminent theorist, but also as a formidable public figure, a true wise man of
American foreign policy.
In thinking about these two extraordinary men, it occurred to me that Mr.
Carnegie and Professor Morgenthau shared a surprising quality. Despite the
incredible hardships of their personal lives and their self-professed realism,
both, by nature, were idealists. Both were propelled through life by an
overwhelming sense of destiny and moral duty. Both understood that power was in
need of direction, of moral purpose. Both saw their life's work as providing a
moral framework for a more peaceful and more just world.
Both Carnegie and Morgenthau were immigrants to America. The circumstances
that led to their emigration were, of course, quite different. Andrew Carnegie
came to Pittsburgh as a young boy in the 1850s with his family, an economic
refugee seeking opportunity. Hans Morgenthau came to America in the 1930s on his
own, a penniless academic, fleeing the Nazis and seeking merely to survive.
So while these two men could not have been more different in their life
stories, personalities, talents, and careers, both were self-made, the kind of
men who make a difference, through their creative genius and sheer force of
will. Both were thinkers, as well as doers. They wrote books and articles. Their
appointment books were filled with speeches, lectures, interviews, public
appearances. Most importantly, they used their acquired influence to lobby the
world's political leaders to promote positive social change.
While Carnegie and Morgenthau never met in person, in a sense they meet here
every year at this lecture. Their legacies built the Carnegie Council and their
ideas still animate all of the work that we do. So it is on this occasion of the
annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture that we honor both of their memories by
taking a hard look at a specific moral challenge. It is in this spirit, and in
the spirit of mutual learning, that we invited Professor Nicholas Negroponte to
be our 2005 lecturer.
Nicholas Negroponte has distinguished himself as both a doer and a thinker.
He is a man of action, a builder of institutions, a resource and a role model
for all of us who take seriously the idea of a planetary ethic, that we do
indeed live in one globalized world, and that there are moral implications of
that fact.
This fall at the Carnegie Council, we launched a series of lectures on the
theme of "A Fairer Globalization." The organizing principle is a simple
question: Can globalization be made to work for all people? We know that there
is a great divide between the haves and the have-nots. Vast inequality is our
reality. The world can be divided between those who are connected and those who
have been left out.
The statistics are familiar to you: More than 1 billion people living on less
than $1 per day, millions and millions more on less than $2 per day. Millions
die from preventable diseases because of lack of access to clean water,
sanitation, and basic health services. Educational opportunity is but a very
distant dream for this ocean of disenfranchised people.
As our series developed, and through our Global Policies
Innovation Project (GPI), funded in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund
and the Ford Foundation, we have been featuring what we might call the best
ideas, the best that has been thought and said about this topic, the best that
is being done to promote and to develop a fairer globalization. Again, our focus
is on positive ideas and alternatives, the creation of new opportunities and new
choices.
In that light, we are privileged to have Professor Negroponte tell us about
his most recent work, The $100 Laptop, a project that will provide access to
billions of the world's youngest and poorest inhabitants. We hear much these
days about democratization and empowerment. Here is a real, live example of an
idea being put into practice that will improve the lives of countless people in
countless ways.
Professor Negroponte is best known to you as the founding chairman of the MIT
Media Lab. He is also the founder of Wired magazine and has been an "angel investor" for over
forty startups, including three in China. Professor Negroponte helped to
establish and serves as chairman of One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit
organization created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab to design,
manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide
every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
Thank you, Professor Negroponte, for coming to the Carnegie Council to be our
Morgenthau Lecturer for 2005 and to share your exciting project with us.
Remarks
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: If you think of any big problem—things like
peace, the environment, poverty—the solution, no matter where you look, includes
education.
Tonight I would like to talk about the $100 Laptop in three parts. This is
really an education project; not a laptop project. Providing education to
children around the world, and since children are the most precious natural
resource of any country, is, unto itself, a solution to many of the world's
problems.
The Media Lab has, since its inception, been involved with computers in
education, and particularly computers for children to learn how to learn.
Seymour Papert, who is still alive, well, and very much a partner and the
theorist behind all of our work in learning, looked at how children could learn
about learning by using a computer, where, effectively, the child is teaching
the computer to do things.
Rather than learning things that you then get graded on or facts that you
have memorized, how can you learn about learning? This has gone on for many
years at the Media Lab. In 1982, the two of us were involved in a center in
France that was way ahead of its time. It was doing the right thing for the
wrong reason, using computers in developing nations for children, back in
1982.
My first slide is 1982, outside of Dakar. The IBM PC did not even exist.
Steve Jobs had given me a couple of hundred Apple computers. We spread them
around in schools outside of Dakar. These kids had more computing power than the
Senegalese government at that point.
One thing that became so obvious is that it made no difference whatsoever
that these kids were from very poor places that had never seen computing. They
were playing these like pianos. There just no difference between what they were
doing and kids in the suburbs of Boston.
In 1988, in Costa Rica, the man running for president, Oscar
Arias, who is again running for president (because they just changed the
law), actually used it as part of his platform. Costa Rica is almost a boutique
country. You can do lots of things in small countries that you can't do in big
countries. They created an organization outside of the government, so after that
government changed, it continued. Every child in Costa Rica now has access to
computers and the Internet.
Today over 50 percent of the exports of Costa Rica are integrated circuits—
larger than coffee and bananas combined.
This slide was from the late 1990s in Kashmir, where we were using the early
versions of WiFi, with very focused antennas. They allowed you to go long
distances, like 50 kilometers, to reach over the mountains and get kids on the
Pakistani side to talk to kids on the Indian side of Kashmir.
We were very concerned with how you bring telecommunications, at very low
cost, to the remote parts of the developing world, by letting people build it
themselves. It gets built from the bottom up rather than having a big telephone
company come in, build a tower, create cell-phone-type connections or string
wires or fibers.
But the truth is that telecommunications is not the problem. There are so
many solutions to telecommunications today—WiFi, WiMAX, 3G—and so many things
are happening in parallel that the world is getting more and more connected.
There are already nearly 2 billion cell-phone users; almost one-third of the
planet is already using cell phones.
Telecommunications is also very elastic. If everybody in this room was
sharing a WiFi connection, we would all be very happy. If another ten people
came in or left the room, we wouldn't notice a difference when we were sending
email and browsing the Web.
On the other hand, the devices themselves matter. If you believe that you
have to provide one laptop per child, if ten new kids come in the room, you need
ten new laptops. The price of that laptop is very fundamental, and today its
cost is very high for artificial reasons.
We decided to build a laptop for $100. People said, "That's impossible,"
which, for me, is a codeword for, "Go do it, or at least try it."
My wife and I did a project in Cambodia in the late 1990s and early 2000.
Money was growing on trees in my world. I had a little too much of it at the
time, so I decided to build some schools in Cambodia. My son was living in Italy
at the time. I said, "If you can suffer the indignity of working for your dad,
why don't you go to Cambodia and set up the Internet in the schools, and I'll
send you some laptops," which he did.
These villages have no electricity, water, telephone, or television. Average
income is $47 a year. Since the only power was the power he was generating, I
wanted to send them some very power-efficient machines. Laptops tend to be more
power-efficient, because they often have to run on batteries.
My son then built WiFi in the village. He encouraged the kids to take the
laptops home. They came back the next day. Not one kid had opened the laptop at
home. They had all been told by their parents that they couldn't open the
laptop, because they might break it, and they didn't want to be responsible.
So he told the kids it didn't matter if they broke them; they couldn't break
them. They were using them in class. It is not as if they didn't know how to use
them. So they all took them home and opened them, and the parents were delighted
because in each case it was the brightest light source in the house. They
started using them at home and they became part of their lives. They brought
them back to school to charge them, because there was no power at home. It would
only last as long as the batteries would last.
In the meantime, Seymour Papert, who lives in Maine most of the time, in the
year 2002, persuaded Governor Angus King to turn the concept of One Laptop Per
Child into legislation, sold on a very simple story: Imagine a country that has
only an oral culture, and no written language. Some elders or intellectuals in
that country invent a written language, and they sit around the room and say,
"Now we have invented the written language. Let's put one pencil in the back of
each classroom." Then somebody says, "No, no. I have a better idea. Let's take
twenty pencils and put them in one special room and let kids use that room for
one hour a week."
Angus King laughed at that. The law went through. Since the year 2002, they
have been rolling out Apple iBooks that are given to kids, who get to take them
home and keep them.
What has happened? In those grades truancy has dropped to almost zero.
Parent-teacher meetings have gone up astronomically. Discipline is noticeably
easier. The most important is that teachers are reporting that the kids in the
classroom are more motivated, more interested, and more active than they have
ever been before. Kids who never asked questions after school when teachers are
office hours are bombarding the teachers with email—to such an extreme that they
had to turn some of the email off at times, because the teachers were getting
swamped.
We created One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) outside of MIT as a nonprofit
association. I had been getting all sorts of advice for it to be profit-making,
because you would be able to attract engineering talent, remunerate people, and
sustain yourself afterwards. It turned out to be exactly the wrong idea.
One of the reasons is simple. That is, when you have in the case of OLPC a
board of directors, their objectives, their goals, are perfectly aligned with
building a $100 laptop and making it cheaper, and more widely available. I have
been on the board of directors of Motorola for about a decade. If we invent a
technology that lowers the cost of the display in your handset by $10, who gets
the $10? My fiduciary responsibility is for the shareholder to get as much of
that $10 as possible. That's the name of the game.
In OLPC, if we make an invention that lowers the cost of the display by $10,
guess who gets the $10? The kids. It's a $90 laptop. Then if we do something
else, it's $80, $75, et cetera. It continues to decrease.
So we have told governments that we will float the price. We will not even
quote a price. It might start at $115.20. From then on, our only guarantee is
that it will go down. With the exception of currency fluctuations and maybe the
fluctuation of the price of memory, it will continue to decrease.
Scale is important, for reasons that are slightly different than you might
imagine. Everybody says, "Sure. You want to make 20 million of these, because
you can get somebody to sell you a component at the lowest possible price
because you have such a high volume." That is true, but that is not the real
advantage of scale.
For a while, we were thinking of making a projector, so that when you opened
your laptop, there would be a little projector inside that would project the
image onto a simple white piece. It only uses a tiny piece of silicon, so it can
be built for about $15. We knew how to build a projector, full-color, for $15,
so this seemed like the solution at the time.
It turns out that the people who dominate the integrated circuit business for
projectors happen to be a very large company that makes these for a couple of
hundred dollars a pop. It is what you see inside when you use one in a
conference room. The chips cost about $100, $150.
We said, "You're interested in very large bright screens, perfect color
uniformity, perfect pixels. We're not. We're interested in small screens. We
don't care about color uniformity. We can have a few pixels that are failed. It
doesn't have to be that bright, because it's small." They said, "That's not our
strategic plan, so we're not interested." I said, "That's a shame, because we
need 150 million a year." They said, "Oh, well, maybe we could."
If the scale is big enough, you can change the strategic plan of a company.
So when somebody says to us, "You can't do something," we are able to say,
"Look, this is the biggest installed base you can possibly imagine. I suggest
that you participate."
To put the numbers into context, we are talking of producing as many as 200
million machines in year two. There are 1 billion kids on the planet. So 200
million ends up covering 20 percent in that particular year. At the end of this
year, the total world output of laptops is slightly below 50 million. So the
numbers are a lot larger than the industry is accustomed.
Take iPods. There are not even 30 million in the whole world since the
inception of the concept and all the various products that have come out. Add
them up worldwide, and you get to a number that is relatively small.
Scale counts. Countries have to give them away free. The ministry of
education buys it, distributes it, like uniforms or shoes or textbooks or
lunches. Even the poorest country in the world spends about $200 a year per
child for education. To find $20, which is what it would be per year if you
amortized this over five years, isn't quite as hard as all of that. Most
countries can do it themselves.
Then we happen to have spectacular corporate partners. After trying to launch
it in China and failing, I got people like Google, News Corp, AMD and Red Hat as
partners, who complemented each other. When I decided to go that route, AMD
agreed in less than 24 hours, Rupert Murdoch agreed in less than 48 hours, and
Google in five days.
So within five days, we were in motion. There is no great magic in laptop
economics. Fifty percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing,
distribution, and profit. We have none of that. So our $100 laptop is, in truth,
a $200 laptop.
Then if you look at the remainder of the cost of your laptop, 50 percent is
the display. We know how to get it down to $35. About 75 percent of the power in
your laptop is used for the operating system.
What I mean by dual-mode display is that we want you to be able to take it
out in the sunlight and read it like a book, or a piece of paper—and it uses the
sunlight itself as the energy, not in the sense of solar power, but that it
reflects the display—and to use it indoors with so-called transmitted color, to
have both modes, so kids can use these like books when they go to bed at night
or they go out in the garden. It is something that is with you, but works both
indoors and outdoors. If you have tried to use your laptop outdoors, you know
what I mean. It is basically impossible.
Windup is very important. You want these to run by cranking them up and
storing the power, or be so power-efficient that they can be cranked.Windup is
not because they may not have power, like that village in Cambodia. But windup
is important because even if you do have power, even if you are Buckley School
and you are wealthy enough to have power in your school, you can't start having
AC adaptors and power cords tracing all over classrooms.
Open source is a very controversial subject. If you have not seen the
Wikipedia, I urge you to do so. The Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia,
written by the readers. When you do Google searches now, very often the
Wikipedia entry comes up.
You say, how could that possibly work? Somebody can go in there and type
complete garbage. But the truth is that it is self-cleansing. Somebody else
reads it and finds out it's wrong and corrects it. It is so current and
up-to-date that within 24 hours after Bush nominated my older brother for
director of national intelligence, it was in my entry. It said, "Nicholas
Negroponte, the brother of the nominee for director"—and I didn't put it there;
he didn't put it there. How did it get there?
Encyclopedia Britannica can't compete. It is not that this is a free
encyclopedia; it is a better encyclopedia. And that is what open source is
about.
I am often asked, "If this is such a good idea, why isn't it happening in the
United States?" I say, "It is. It's happening in Maine." They say, "That's kind
of small. That doesn't count."
When the governor of Massachusetts asked me to have lunch with him, I said,
"You should do One Laptop Per Child and change education in your state." In
September, my office got a call, "The governor is wondering if Nicholas would
like to join him for his press conference tomorrow." I said, "What press
conference?" They said, "The press conference announcing One Laptop Per Child,
his proposed legislation."
So I had people working with us produce a model overnight. The governor got
up and said, "I'd like to introduce Professor Negroponte, who will tell you
about One Laptop Per Child." Then he started taking questions. What happens to
kids who come home from school to their rough neighborhoods to have bully kids
beat them up to steal their laptops? He said, "Why would they do that? I'll give
the bullies laptops, too."
Now we are working closely with the UNDP to get into places like Africa and
small countries, where we can't do it ourselves.
We started looking at how we could make this both an electronic book or a
real laptop. If you turn it the other way, you can use it as a games machine. If
you lay it flat on the table, you can use it as a tablet and draw on it. So it
has about five or six different modes of usage. It folds back, so it can turn
into a television set. In fact, we even have some ideas of how multiple machines
can behave together to make themselves into an antenna, so that the kids don't
need a satellite dish. They are the dish. That means you can have communications
in very remote places. This is something the military already does.
This slide shows the $100 laptop that we will unveil in Tunis at the World
Summit on the Information Society. We chose this forum because almost 200
countries will be there—often the minister of education, definitely the minister
of communications, and for about forty-five or fifty countries, it will include
the head of state.
Because we are nonprofit, because the Media Lab is well-known, because MIT is
a good brand unto itself— it's not difficult to get in to see the head of state
or the minister of education, even in big countries. We are not selling
anything. It is harder for Michael Dell or Bill Gates to get in those
offices.
What we have decided to do is to launch with five or six big countries to get
scale. Pick the largest Arab country, which is Egypt; the largest Sub-Saharan
African country, which is Nigeria; the largest South American country, which is
Brazil. Pick China. Pick India. Thailand is in there as a Southeast Asian
country.
The idea is to launch simultaneously in those countries. We have created a
waiting list in each part of the world to ensure that we can launch with 5
million or 10 million machines in each place.
Building the $100 laptop turns out to be difficult, but it's not the hardest
part of the problem. Rolling it out will be different in each country. We want
to get the teachers on our side, even though they are not, in the end, the major
agents of change. The kids are doing most of it, as Maine has proved. But in the
state of Maine, 80 percent of the teachers were very apprehensive. Over time, we
won over almost all of them.
You have to do it exponentially. We have a person going from MIT to spend
three weeks in Brazil with the best teachers with other laptops (not ours),
showing some of the theories of constructionist learning, learning by doing,
tools for kids to make things with—this isn't giving them encyclopedias or
drill-and-practice or so-called learning software—and then teaching the
teachers, so that, at the end of three weeks, let's say twenty-five out of the
thirty are good enough to teach teachers themselves. Then they teach a group of
thirty, of which, let's say, twenty-five are good enough to teach a group of
thirty. If you do that four times, you get to over 100,000 teachers, the
numbers, again, depending on the size of the country. China alone has 220
million kids in primary and secondary school. Half the kids in the world are in
China and India.
On this slide, you see our second generation. While we are not building it at
the moment, we know how to make electronic paper. You can see a piece of
flexible paper in the bottom left-hand corner, which we believe we can produce
at ten cents a square inch. It is being manufactured at the moment in small runs
meaning 1,000, 2,000 pieces. Last year, Sony released an electronic book based
on this technology.
My final slide shows that you can print on a sheet of paper or plastic and
bend it to make a laptop. That kind of laptop could cost in the $20 or $30
range, but will not happen until 2009 or 2010, which, for some of us, feels like
a long way off.
I have never been involved with anything like this before. There isn't a
single negative angle to the story. Everybody is rallying around it. Even people
who you might think might stand to lose from it, whether it is the traditional
manufacturers or Microsoft or somebody who makes textbooks.
People have realized that this is going to happen. We have powerful
companies, powerful friends. We have a lot of money suddenly behind us, and
governments and heads of state wanting to sign on.
You can't argue against open source and be closed to Microsoft. So we are
talking to Microsoft. One of my friends said to me, "Nicholas, you have to talk
to them, because the worst thing would be is that they would compete with you by
building their own $100 laptop." I said, "What better news on the planet could
there be?" If they want to do it, be my guest.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: One possible downside is the ultimate disposal of laptops.
What is the life of the PC? What do you do with all of them?
Have you looked at solar as a power source as opposed to windup?
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: We are looking at all forms of energy. But what
is important about the windup is that it's self-contained. One of the things we
have to do with our laptop is have a 12-volt input. Car batteries work. Solar
power panels very often generate 12 volts, all sorts of parasitic power.
One of the cutest examples I saw, which was done by a faculty member at the
Media Lab, was to have a little wheel sticking out of the side of the laptop
with a string wrapped around it and a rock hanging on the string, so it works
like a cuckoo clock. As this rock goes down and hits the floor, then you just
pull the string. You're typing, and you can pull the string. You need another
weight on the other side, so the thing doesn't tip.
There are many forms of parasitic power. People have designed seesaws for
playgrounds, where kids take their batteries, put them in the seesaw, and the
kids on the seesaw are recharging them. Or kicking a soccer ball around
generates power, and then you bring the ball in and plug it into your
laptop.
The environmental issue is not only a major one, but my most frequently asked
question. Part of that comes from the fact that we are dumping used equipment in
foreign countries. I don't mean it in the financial sense of dumping, but in the
literal sense. Many people are refurbishing laptops and sending them overseas.
While that is well-meaning, it is very expensive. We are better advised to find
a way to get rid of them in some environmental-friendly fashion rather than
export them.
In the case of the $100 laptop, we will put strong conditions on the
manufacturer—we have five manufacturers bidding at this moment. One of them
recently quoted a price of $104. So we are not far off. In the manufacturing
process, toxicity exists, and then in the device itself, it is not clear whether
the components could ever be physically biodegradable, but we will certainly
explore that.
In the developing world, often these devices have a much longer life. I would
expect that they would last five, six years, and then be used as a TV. In other
words, it may not live on as a laptop, but it would probably be used as an
entertainment appliance.
QUESTION: This is a great idea, and I'm all for it. My major concern
is not to do with bullies taking laptops away from kids; it's the adults. You
will be introducing $100 laptops into family homes where $100 can provide a lot
of food, a fuel, energy. In many of these countries as well, there are crime
syndicates and gangs. Will these laptops be educational tools, or a new form of
currency?
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: The worst part of the gray market is not so much
robbers and thieves taking them from kids walking home. In some countries,
government gives shoes to kids, and the parents sell the shoes, and the kids go
to school barefoot.
One of the reasons that this happens is that there is a market for the shoes.
There are other feet out there that could use those shoes. While there are other
hands that can use the laptop, I point out to people that there are not too many
stolen Post Office trucks, and there is not any gray market today on Post Office
trucks, but there are lots of stolen cars in the United States.
Why are Post Office trucks not stolen? Because they look like Post Office
trucks, and if you are seen driving one, you have obviously stolen or bought it
from somebody who stole it. So we will make this machine so distinctive that in
order to get rid of that distinction, you will have to destroy it, and help
solve it by providing a commercial machine at nearly the same price. That helps
a little bit of the gray market.
In places where we have worked, in the worst of urban poverty, adults protect
the kids. The kids go to school with their laptops. They are not stolen. The
community rallies around to support this. Even the most criminal criminal knows
that, for his kids at least, education is the one hope.
If 3 percent of them are stolen, then 3 percent are stolen. But I don't think
it will be an epidemic.
My last remark about that is that countries will embarrass each other into
doing better. By launching the program in parallel, countries will be competing
to use them better.
QUESTION: I spent two years working as an AmeriCorps member in West
Philadelphia refurbishing computers and creating a technology service program.
We brought Dell computer, literacy classes, high school programs, and various
other technology-oriented devices, to the community.
It's wonderful to back the notion of bringing a $100 laptop to everyone. But
you mentioned that this is an education issue. From my experience of working
with the teachers in the community, they don't see this so much as a
technological problem; they see it as a literacy issue. Yes, the kids are more
fluent using macromedia flash, but they can't write. Yes, they are fine learning
the basics of computer programming, but they can't communicate; they can't
speak.
I am concerned about the lowering of the quality of standards and conditions
of what education is coming to be, with regard to technology, because much
investment and much intelligent brainpower is going to the hardware question and
not so much to the literacy phenomenon.
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: What we have found is that the teachers who
complain about the kids not being literate often don't realize that literacy
isn't relevant to them. We started to discover this right here in Harlem in the
1970s, when we were doing work with Logo, with what were then called
mini-computers. There was a school in Harlem with twenty terminals, all running
Logo. It was a great success. The school was more or less demolished, not just
with graffiti, but broken windows—except for this one computer room that the
kids were doing themselves.
At the time, we were being funded by the National Science Foundation to look
at the use of computers in learning and how it fundamentally changed the
acquisition of knowledge. The funding agents went to look at that school one
afternoon. There was only one kid left in the computer room. They were visiting
the principal, but they were a little early for the meeting. They went
downstairs and they found a kid, who was cleaning the room. They said, "Can you
show us the computers?" The kid said, "Sure," and turned on the computers, fired
up Logo.
Then they say, "Can you get it to do this?" It did that. So they finally ask
Enrique something he can't do. There is a manual beside the computer. He flips
through the manual. He finds it. He does it.
The time comes for their meeting with the principal. They tell him, "We were
a little early, and we went down to the classroom, and Enrique was cleaning and
he showed us what to do. What was remarkable was that this eleven-year-old child
not only could do what he was doing, but could go through the manual so quickly
to find out how to do something he didn't know."
The principal said, "No. You've made a mistake. It must not be Enrique
because he can't read. We are sending him to a special school for the disabled
next year." So they go down to the room, and indeed it's Enrique.
One of the NSF people looks at the kid and says, "Enrique, can you read?" He
says, "No, I can't read." He said, "But wait a second. What were you doing when
you flipped through that manual?" He said, "That? That's not reading. I can do
that. They give me these stupid things about Dick and Jane and Spot and balls
and stuff. I can't do that." He goes through and he reads it.
I don't even like to read. But suddenly it becomes relevant. Email,
communicating, sending your grandparents a message, and all of these things
start to build up. It may not be James Joyce in the beginning, but suddenly
reading and writing have a lot of relevance to kids. We may think that those SMS
messages are stupid. But it's the beginning of words coming back in other
ways.
When I was in school, I was asked to read things that didn't seem relevant.
One of the most important and most generalizable things about the use of
computers in education is that all of us in this room learned how to walk and
talk by interacting with the world, by experimenting, by getting something for
doing it, being able to stand up, reach something, communicate, ask for
something. Suddenly, at the age of six, we are told, "Stop. For the next twelve
years, all of your learning is going to come from being told, by books,
teachers, people standing at podiums."
That's okay for some things. But the big change will occur in the way we
learned to walk and talk, by exploration, curiosity, self-motivation, driving,
communicating with other kids. We want five countries in different parts of the
world to launch talking to the other countries. In Cambodia, the first English
word of every kid in that village is "Google." They know every soccer player in
Brazil by name. They want Renaldo T-shirts, sweatshirts. You can say, "Why
should they be learning about Renaldo?" It is not that they are learning about
Renaldo; it is that they are using the Net to communicate and learn.
QUESTION: What do you do about printers?
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE: We have several companies that have offered us
$39 printers, and one person even has a printer that won't use any disposable
materials. There will be a whole galaxy of peripherals that plug into this
machine—cameras, printers, DVDs. We hope to see a whole industry emerge to make
low-end printers, scanners, cameras.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thank you for sharing your insights and enthusiasm.
