twentythreeseven Yet another design, technology and basketball blog.

BusinessWeek has an indepth article about the laptop in the OLPC initiative.

Again, I can’t stress how much I love this project. We are fortunate to be able to access information and education for free and now these kids will have the same opportunity. Moreso, they’ll experience computers in a much different way than most of have (until now) — as social, collaborative tools that foster relationships and group work instead just being fast typewriters.

If you’re still not getting the impact, think of the first thing you learned on a computer. Most of us will probably say word processing or a single-player game. These kids will be learning about setting up groups by seeking out other OLPC laptops and creating projects. And if you think of all the MySpace’s, Facebook’s, dating sites and IM tools, isn’t that what we’re just figuring out how to do now?