14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday morning on CNN the special guest, Nicholas Negroponte was demonstrating the One Laptop Per Child Program. As usual, the anchor asked about the success the program has had and the answer - apart from being the usual pitch/sales line "It was very well received", followed by the commercial part - totally blew my mind. "Many of the young kids in Rwanda using the laptop - their first word is Google."
Oh, come on! It's not like Google was needing all this free publicity! What do you mean their first word is Google? It's like? no more basic needs for the little rascals, no need for care and no desire for food or for comfort? Why don't we just plug them into the mainframe and they'll manage to feed themselves on searches and find happiness in online gaming. That would be the next step I think, a human-interfaced search engine. You ask the question and it won't be like there's any mike distortion problems or words that it doesn't understand because of your accent. It'll just be a clean straightforward answer which'll probably be a lot better because it won't include any ads if you don't want it to do so. And the subjects, by the looks of it, will all be volunteers. How cool is that?
And I don't really think that the "100 ebooks they can share to create a never-ending supply of books" is what the children in Rwanda need at the moment. All the movies I've seen about life there depict something less than an Internet-user-friendly environment, with famine and lack of clean water, with fires in the middle of the village as the central heating system and I'm not being sarcastic or ironic about it.
The children there need a future of their own, not a laptop to connect to the Internet and share books. But hey, if Negroponte says so? who am I to say he's making it up?