A Totally New Concept for Learning Devices

The book.

That's the latest “totally new concept for learning devices” from Nicholas Negroponte.

To be fair, it's not just a book. It's a battery-powered book. That is new indeed, because a regular book won't stop working in broad daylight, but an OLPC XO2 can.

The OLPC Kool-Aid-addled salesmen continue to trot out the fuzzy math concept that developing countries spend USD 20/year per student on textbooks. I've heard this before from their staff and demanded documentation, and none was forthcoming. I'm not asking just for the sake of it; I'm asking because I absolutely, totally refuse believe that number, for more reasons than I can count.

Notice that Negroponte no longer mentions India in his list of developing countries (besides, there's no room for two `I's in his BRIC...), now that the country wisely turfed his snake-oil out.

One Lesson Per Century

I'm not usually into the +1 thing, and I've been doing the utmost to hold my tongue on One Laptop Per Child, but Ivan Krstić gets it so right that I can't help but ask you to read his post.