One Laptop Per Child: one trainer prepares
by Andy Oram
Sebastian Silva is a bit worried. Three hundred thousand XO units will arrive in Peru by August, the largest deployment in the world by far. (Uruguay started this past December and will reach one hundred thousand laptops this year.) As a volunteer on the OLPC support team, Sebastian wants to make sure the children, teachers, and technical trainers are ready.
Sebastian sees the promise of computing as in social terms. With XO, every person becomes a TV broadcaster--and XO is even more empowering, because TV broadcasts can't be chopped up and digitally altered. Sebastian says he learned Logo before he learned to read and write, and its mastery gave him a learning attitude that he's preserved his whole life. He wants children not just to make movies and write papers, but to appreciate the drastically open nature of the systems they're given.
"If OLPC succeeds, there will someday be more OLPC-like systems in the world than traditional PCs," he says. "The Internet could very well be transformed by the behavior of people using the OLPC systems."
|Congratulations to Sebastian on a fantastic initiative.|