Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child

I presented last year at EG. So this is an update: What’s happened, where has it gone? What are the kids learning and what are the teachers telling us from around the world?

Netbooks, a new layer of affordable laptops in the $350 price point, by sometime in the next year will represent 50% of the market worldwide. That’s an incredible change. I should feel good about it but I don’t. Because the reason the people who created Netbooks, the people who took our idea – well, they don’t care about the reason why we started this program, and Netbooks don’t satisfy the various elements the XO does (lack of electricity issues, sturdiness, focus on kids & education, the ability to view the screen in the sunlight bc many schools are outside). They copied it but they did not really copy it in its totality.

Half a million laptops are in the hands of kids around the world, in very remote places. Half a million are in transit and half a million are in construction. It’s going all over the place.

Teachers say they have never enjoyed teaching so much. [image: children grouped around a professor]. What types of results are happening? Reading comprehension going through the roof. 100% more kids are going to school. A lot more peer to peer teaching. Now parents are learning from children.

There are parts of this world where we can’t bring them in on our own. Just last week we were in Columbia handing out laptops in the far regions – we went in with the Minister of Defense (not the Minister of Education), so we had a ton of security. Thousands of these laptops are going into a zone that has been isolated for 40 years. Why is the Minister of Defense doing this? It’s a way to bring a window into the rest of the world for a part of the world that has been isolated. (All of the machines are bi-lingual.)

Saturation. Every child in Uruguay is getting a laptop. The numbers are interesteing. 450K kids in Uruguay. 200K have them today. Uruguay is so saturated they are now issuing postage stamps with the laptop image on it.

Give One Get One. The $0 laptop. We’re able to go to places that really do distinguish the mission and the market. We’ve been caught up in this competitive market stuff – Intel, IBM. But this is about kids in the developing world. So this program is starting but given the economy it’s off to a slow start.