The $100 laptop

John is a little skeptical of the real utility of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptops for children in the developing world.

" the pedagogical philosophy implicit in OLPC is clearly inspired by Negroponte's MIT colleague, Seymour Papert.

Papert is a visionary whose entire career has been driven by the idea of the digital computer as a revolutionary machine...

Papert is an engaging thinker and writer, but is essentially a techno-evangelist...

He is thus rather grandly contemptuous of mundane questions such as whether there is any evidence that giving kids computers is educationally better than giving them books..."

As I've said before, you can't get someone to understand the principles of drawing graphs by getting them to show you how many colours the graphics package on their computer can deploy in producing something that looks like a graph on screen. By all means exploit technology (including the humble pencil) in education where it is useful and let people play with technology in education in order to find out how it can be useful. But spending vast sums on technology in the blind faith belief that it will automatically improve things regardless of the context, is a mug's game.