Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child
Nicholas Negroponte parle de "One Laptop per Child" (un ordinateur portable par enfant)
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. Full bio
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I think, who did that.
under Ricky's regime --
what the Media Lab was doing,
I quit the Media Lab.
I stepped down as chairman --
but someone else has taken it on --
you can do as a professor
the One Laptop Per Child,
for a year and a half, anyway.
to tell you why we're doing it,
and then what we're doing.
to talk about some of the big issues,
that at least drove me to do this.
a head of state, and you say,
natural resource?"
they will pretty quickly agree with you.
the solutions are to the big problems,
sometimes can be just education
some element of education.
is a little bit less obvious.
learned how to walk, how to talk,
or taught how to walk,
of being able to ask for something,
we were told to stop learning that way,
would happen through teaching,
like I'm doing now,
that computers have provided to learning
like walking and talking,
by the learner himself or herself.
when we were working in Senegal.
the $100 laptop just happened a year ago,
or we were struck by lightning --
and in fact, back to the '60s.
We were in Senegal.
to developing countries
that these kids,
barely was their language,
I got involved personally.
no water, no television, no telephone,
their first English word is "Google"
in a hut that doesn't have electricity.
because when they open up the laptops,
in the house.
where metaphors and reality mix --
Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine
in the year 2002.
that 80 percent of the teachers were --
that the money would be used
more schools, whatever.
years later, guess what?
drop of truancy to almost zero,
and now almost everybody does --
increase in student participation.
it's kind of fun to teach.
which interests me the most,
at certain times at night
are getting too much email
that you have to test.
when people say,
in our country to see how it works."
and someone else will do it,
that this works, you can join as well.
was formed about a year and a half ago.
to just get this built,
buy components at a lower price, OK?
to a manufacturer --
perfect color uniformity.
We're interested in the living room.
in perfect color uniformity.
bright displays.
because we need 100 million units a year."
become part of your strategic plan."
in the first run.
to launch with enough scale
helps bring the price down,
seven to 10 million there.
without a sales-and-marketing team.
at the sales-and-marketing team.
to seven large countries
Google would be one.
in the press a great deal.
that we introduced with Kofi Annan
that was held in Tunisia.
they say, "Ah, this is a laptop project."
It's an education project.
and I'm quite focused on it --
but now I'm a laser --
and it turns out it's not so hard.
are the following:
it's more like 60,
distribution and profit.
and the governments distribute it.
to the school system like a textbook.
10 dollars a diagonal inch.
it can drop to seven
or to one and a half,
that is pretty fascinating,
is devoted to itself.
to move their obesity.
which is incredible.
since their inception.
less reliably and less pleasantly
you even get standing ovations,
with you? Why are we all sitting there?"
called our laptop a "gadget" recently.
like a bat out of hell.
it's going to go 'bing.'"
it'll be a mesh network,
they all become a network,
one or two points of backhaul.
with two megabits.
can connect themselves,
that both works outdoors --
outdoors in the sunlight?
most of the time, most cell phones.
that will be both frontlit and backlit.
or you do it in the software
it's black and white
more or less living in Taiwan right now.
we'll know for sure whether this works.
really can do the maintenance.
that people don't believe,
that we're going to go.
that we didn't think was possible.
engineering sort of embodiment of it
to this handsome gentleman.
whether it goes left or --
for the people down in simulcast --
CA: Just show it off a bit.
OK, good point. Thank you, Chris.
it would be not only a laptop,
into an electronic book.
it's in black and white.
and it's a television set.
for simulcast? OK, sorry.
which way to send it afterwards.
because they actually have to do a bid.
and so on and so forth.
they don't have to do bids.
"Let's do it at the state level,"
than the feds, just because of size.
with the federal government.
with ministries of education.
around the world,
tend to be the most conservative,
they know about education,
And so it's certainly the hard road.
they're pretty geoculturally distributed.
the most active and most agreed.
not signing anything with anybody
each one of those countries
every three weeks.
away free in two years at this meeting.
to start, then drift down.
at a price and then drift up.
or it can't be scaled out.
in the case of the gray market
that is so utterly unique --
that automobiles --
are stolen every day in the United States.
post-office truck is stolen.
for post-office trucks.
You can do anything you want.
no white Volvos are stolen.
very much like a white Volvo.
to all work together
is to start with the federal governments
to subsequently go to other --
for a child in the developing world,
maybe of the same age.
as a birthday present.
that will happen,
it's an education project.
the education content.
in learning by doing
which was started in 1968,
if you've ever even heard of it,
really don't want to criticize this,
a nonprofit effort
is a little bit stupid, actually.
that people could criticize was,
professors and so on couldn't do it,
called Quanta agreed to build it,
of all the laptops on the planet today,
of whether it's going to happen.
at 138 dollars, so what?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nicholas Negroponte - Tech visionaryThe founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.
Why you should listen
A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte founded (and was the first director of) MIT's Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff across a broad range of disciplines. An original investor in Wired (and the magazine's "patron saint"), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology -- ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he's funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.
But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is designing, manufacturing and distributing low-cost, wireless Internet-enabled computers costing roughly $100 and aimed at children. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of children in the developing world.
Nicholas Negroponte | Speaker | TED.com