万花筒 Kaleidoscope2007-09-27&09-28, 笔记本电脑，为了孩子们（在线收听）

A visionary new mission to get a laptop into the hands of every poor child in the world, one billion of them. Today, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is announcing the “Give One, Get One” Program. Listen to this, for 400 dollars you can buy a laptop for your child and another one is sent to a needy child in a foreign country. Sounds great. Can this project change the world? For the answer, B, G.

For first and second graders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, new laptops are fun, new fixtures in the classrooms.

You can, um, use it for your homework.

You, you could do kids stuff on it

And I can pick it up. See!

Wow!

If MIT professor Nicolas Negroponte has his way, scenes like this one will play out in classrooms around the world. His dream: to give each child in the developing world one of his specially designed laptops.

If you think of it as a laptop, it can be viewed as a luxury. If you think of it as education, it’s not a luxury.

Just how cool are the laptops? Well, according to the panel of experts I turned to, the products are extremely cool, allowing users not only to surf the net and read e-books, but to draw, to chat, to make movies. And since so many of its potential users don’t have electricity, there is the added bonus of being able to recharge the laptops with hand cranks or solar power. They are also certifiably kid-tested, able to withstand milk spills and drops of up to 5 feet.

Negroponte has been working to sell the low cost computers to government leaders who in turn give them to their country’s children. But now he is looking for the private sector to get in on the giving. Beginning November 12th, consumers can purchase two of the special laptops, one for themselves and one for a child in the developing country. Retail price for both, 400 dollars.

I am sure they will sell given that you got a 200-dollar tax write-off in addition to getting a really cool laptop.

Negroponte admits his ultimate goal is a lofty one.

10, 15 years from now, how will this world be different?

Poverty will be eliminated and there will be world peace.

10 to 15 years?

Might take 20.