Forgetting the unanswered concerns of Chris Broad, head of IS&T, UK Atomic Energy Authority who says:
Giving equipment or even building a school does not contribute to educating the children unless the trained teachers and infrastructure is also there.Negroponte focused on functionality and buyer's infrastructure.
"I urge you look carefully at our specs and examine why open source is 50 per cent of the world's server market. Our laptop will not only be very fast and not limited, it will have three features no other laptop has: sun-light readable mode, human power option, and mesh network built in. 'Limited' is hardly the right word,"And then he went back to the whole "shared pencil" idea I'll not bore you with yet again. Yo Nicolas, we love your idea, we just wanna see you think it through. A million laptops falling from the sky into unwary cultures and into untrained teachers' classrooms sounds like a movie I saw once. It was about a Coke bottle falling from a plane. Sound familiar?
Looks like I'm not the only one who's getting seriously narced by the whole "laptop"="pencil" meme.
To quote a post I made on my site (sorry), I’d venture that once the following four words were seized upon, “One Laptop Per Child” and the project named accordingly, the developers backed themselves into a corner ideologically. After all, with that name, they aren’t going to develop something that isn’t a laptop or that isn’t supplied on a per person basis, no matter what critical problems they hit, are they?