Columbia Broadcasting System’s Sixty Minutes and Education Week both published an article about the issue of every child in the world receiving a laptop. Lesley Stahl, a correspondent for Columbia Broadcasting System, discusses this issue with the head leader of this project. Nicholas Negroponte had a dream about the positive possibilities of children’s futures. He thought this could happen by introducing a new non-profit project called “One Laptop Per Child”. What I learned from the article was it seemed that Nicholas only was interested in helping underprivileged children. Most of these children had never seen electricity and he wanted to supply them with cheap costing laptops. Sounds like an ineffective teaching skill to me. You cannot expect to hand a child with hardly any educational background a computer thinking he or she could learn. I have seen underprivileged children trying to learn and it does not just come with a click of your finger. Nicholas realized his dream two years ago when he visited a school his family started in Cambodia. This small village did not have electricity or running water. His family supplied the school with generators, a satellite dish, and laptops for the children. That is wonderful and I totally support his family’s school but children need educators along with technology, not just here is a computer now go learn something. Nicholas even mentioned on how fast the children would learn to use a computer. “They get it instantly. It takes a 10-year-old child about three minutes”. Really, only three minutes?, that sounds hard to believe a child who has had no electricity or running water could learn to use a computer in that short amount of time. “The One Laptop Per Child computer is a computing revolution,” Nicholas stated. Everything was going as planned until Nicholas realized he had some competition. “This lab in Sao Paulo is testing two other laptops the Brazilian government is thinking of buying for school children, including one made in India and Negroponte’s biggest competitor: the Classmate by Intel, the giant chip maker”. Nicholas thinks that, “this competition will force him out of business”. If it is a non-profit organization, why would he not want more people to help? He only wanted, “the potential of young children’s minds to expand with great knowledge”. Did he mean to say only underprivileged children? He said, “Intel is ruining his dream. His future he had planned to help underprivileged children”. He should be thinking about how to educate all children in the world. After reading this article on Nicholas’s dream of OLPC, it seemed as though he was just worried about another company taking his invention, “his dream”. What about the children not only in Cambodia, but everywhere in the world who needs a better education? That should be the important aspect.

Stahl, Lesley. “What If Every Child Had A Laptop?” 2 December 2007: 3-. CBS Interactive Inc. 17 June 2008
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