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<TITLE>Re: One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative</TITLE>
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<FONT SIZE="2"><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:9.0px'>Way down on the OLPC timeline is this entry: “1982: In a French government-sponsored pilot project, [Seymour] Papert and Negroponte distribute Apple II microcomputers to school children in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal. The experience confirms one of Papert's central assumptions: children in remote, rural, and poor regions of the world take to computers as easily and naturally as children anywhere. These results will be validated in subsequent deployments in several countries, including Pakistan, Thailand, and Colombia.” [<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.laptop.org/vision/progress/">http://www.laptop.org/vision/progress/</a></U></FONT>]<BR>
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The project was the brainchild of French journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who convinced his friend François Mitterrand to create for him the Centre Mondial pour l'Informatique et les Resources Humaines. The idea, roughly, was to jumpstart pre-industrial societies into post-industrial ones through ubiquitous computers and forget the smokestacks part. Alan Kay was involved in early meetings and suggested Negroponte as head and Papert as chief scientist. The MIT Media Lab had just been officially approved and the building was under construction, so Nicholas accepted the appointment as an interim position. He brought with him some of the best and brightest from MIT to spend time in Paris.<BR>
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By most all accounts, it was a disaster. Alan Kay, who was at the time head of Atari Research, mentioned to me around then that things weren’t going well. “Politics?” I asked. “No” replied Alan. “French politics.”<BR>
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The earliest entry on the OLPC timeline is 1967, with the introduction of Papert’s Logo programming language for children. Papert got his start with Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who formalized the theory of constructivism, which is, without splitting hairs, that people learn by doing.<BR>
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This is all to say that OLPC may be geeky, but it’s neither uninformed nor flippant.<BR>
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Cheers,<BR>
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<I>Michael Naimark<BR>
</I><FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.naimark.net">http://www.naimark.net</a></U></FONT> <BR>
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<I>Research Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division<BR>
USC School of Cinematic Arts<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://interactive.usc.edu">http://interactive.usc.edu</a></U></FONT></I></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10.0px'><BR>
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