Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Conclusion
lectual pedigree and structure reveal an enterprise of breathtaking theoretical
and logistical ambition. The education Negroponte refers to is not the rote
learning represented by the typical textbook and the three R’s that form the
basis of most developing and developed country curricula. Rather, the XO is
shaped to reflect the theories of fellow Media Lab visionary Seymour Papert.
Alternately known as constructionism or constructivism, Papert’s vision of education
downplays drills in hard facts and abstract skills in favor of a model that
teaches students how to learn by asking them to undertake projects that they
find relevant to their everyday lives. 4
A modest incarnation of the OLPC project would distribute PCs as electronic
workbooks. The PCs would run the consumer operating systems and applications
prevailing in the industrialized world—the better to groom students
for work in call centers and other outsourced IT-based industries. Microsoft,
under competition from free operating systems, has shown a willingness to
greatly reduce the prices for its products in areas where wallets are smaller, so
such a strategy is not necessarily out of reach, and in any case the XO machine
could run one of the more consumer-friendly versions of free Linux without
much modification. 5
But the XO completely redesigns today’s user interfaces from the ground up.
Current PC users who encounter an XO have a lot to unlearn. For example, the
arrow pointer serves a different purpose: moving the XO’s arrow toward the
center of the screen indicates options that apply only to that computer; moving
the pointer toward any edge indicates interaction with nearby computers or the
community at large.
The XO envisions students who are able to hack their own machines: to reprogram
them even as they are learning to read and write—and to do so largely
on their own initiative. The XO dissemination plan is remarkably light on both
student and teacher training. There are a handful of trainers to cover the thousands
of schools that will serve as distribution points, and the training function
is more to ensure installation and functioning of the servers rather than true
mastery of the machines. Students are expected to rely on each other and on
trial-and-error to acquire most of the skills needed to use and reprogram the
machines.
Content also seems a calculated afterthought. The XO project wiki—haphazardly
organized, as wikis tend to be—featured a “call for content” in late
2006, mere months before millions of machines were to be placed in children’s
hands, for “content creators, collectors, and archivists, to suggest educational
content for inclusion with the laptops, to be made available to millions of chil-