Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I hope you’re not getting tired of the coverage of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative here on the STL Blog. It isn’t anything compared to the coverage the OLPC is planning. Literally. Andy Carvin has an interview with Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, Chief Technology Officer for OLPC. While the screen does sound amazing (and they’re not going to patent it), what totally blew me away was their five-year goal: one billion laptops in the hands of children. Dr. Jepsen had two other quotes of interest:

• "The governments are competing with each other to be the first buyers of the first million units."
• When asked what OLPC’s biggest challenge was, her answer: "Hiring."

Update (if you can call blogging about something from two months ago an update)

Wired News (WN below) ran an interview with OLPC’s chair, Nicholas Negroponte, on Nov. 17. Excerpted:

WN: So you’re shipping this with development tools installed?

Negroponte: Yes. Absolutely.

WN: We’re talking about C compilers and Make and the whole programming environment?

Negroponte: Yup.

WN: Is the goal literally to make computers available to every child that wants one in the world?

Negroponte: It’s every child in the world whether they want one or not. They may not know they want one.

WN: You’re going to be unleashing a whole new generation of open-source programmers, who otherwise would never, possibly, have gotten their hands on a computer.

Negroponte: I hope so. I hope we unleash half a billion of them.

Big doings, to say the least.