Via Kairosnews, this Linux news web site, this blurb at Arstechnica, and the One Laptop per Child homepage, here’s some pr-type info on the progress of the One Laptop Per Child initiative from MIT. The computer they’ve developed and are ready to test is called the CM1 (Children’s Machine 1), and it will cost about $140. The goal is to get them to kids in the developing world, but quite frankly, I think there are a lot of kids in places like Detroit who could use these things too.
Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Here’s a machine which is low cost and designed specifically for classroom use. It’s hard to tell for sure based on the little information that’s out there, but I will bet that the final version may be exactly the kind of basic tool that will work well for fostering the type of learning we’d like to see in every K-6 (and maybe even higher grades). Of course, it would requires to look at the laptop holistically and see the pedagogical potential instead of the current focus on individual tools and geek-like tunnel vision on extensive feature sets.