Words matter. These are the best Nicholas Negroponte Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.
We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.
I’m not good at selling laptops. I’m good at selling ideas.
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.
This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.
We’ve been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.
Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
Linux is its own worst enemy: it’s splintered, it has different distributions, it’s too complex to run for most people.
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.
Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient’s point of view, that’s zero.
Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they… can never be without some element of education.
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.
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.
It bothers me when people spoil the market.
Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.
We have to make machines understand what they’re doing, or they won’t be able to come back and say, ‘Why did you do that?’
Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn’t have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They’re going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.
One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.
