Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant. Nicholas Negroponte More Quotes by Nicholas Negroponte More Quotes From Nicholas Negroponte Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing. Nicholas Negroponte competingbigsthinking Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource. Nicholas Negroponte believepeopleworld MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom. Nicholas Negroponte mitacademic-freedomacademic By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another. Nicholas Negroponte onlinewayyears Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years. Nicholas Negroponte militarywindyears This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries. Nicholas Negroponte cyberspaceunderstandinglimits Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation. Nicholas Negroponte peerscomputerteaching I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas. Nicholas Negroponte sellinglaptopsideas 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-enemyrunningpeople 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 writingmeankids The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning. Nicholas Negroponte seamlesslaptopskind 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-downselforder My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business. Nicholas Negroponte sellinglaptopsgoal 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 termbigsresearch 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 wirephonespeople 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 papermeanbook Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air. Nicholas Negroponte breathingairkids 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 mediazeroway I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that. Nicholas Negroponte omeletspeoplethinking Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money. Nicholas Negroponte googleadvertisingpowerful
