It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it. Nicholas Negroponte More Quotes by Nicholas Negroponte More Quotes From Nicholas Negroponte Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource. Nicholas Negroponte believe people world MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom. Nicholas Negroponte mit academic-freedom academic By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another. Nicholas Negroponte online way years Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years. Nicholas Negroponte military wind years This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries. Nicholas Negroponte cyberspace understanding limits Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation. Nicholas Negroponte peers computer teaching I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas. Nicholas Negroponte selling laptops ideas Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people. Nicholas Negroponte worst-enemy running people Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn. Nicholas Negroponte writing mean kids The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning. Nicholas Negroponte seamless laptops kind Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism. Nicholas Negroponte top-down self order My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business. Nicholas Negroponte selling laptops goal Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble. Nicholas Negroponte term bigs research It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call. Nicholas Negroponte wire phones people To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper. Nicholas Negroponte paper mean book Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air. Nicholas Negroponte breathing air kids When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media. Nicholas Negroponte media zero way I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that. Nicholas Negroponte omelets people thinking Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money. Nicholas Negroponte google advertising powerful Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water. Nicholas Negroponte fish-tanks water kids
