A former colleague, one of the most pleasant and caring I've ever known, is currently having a fascinating time in South Africa as part of a LECT study trip there. I went on one of these trips to Canada pre-blog era and wished I was able to recount what I felt in that exciting and shattering week.
Today Chris Stevendale talks about a visit to intensely motivated, intensely under-resourced schools and makes me wonder what is most important for these kids, some of the more fortunate ones in the African continent. These are the kids for whom a windup laptop would make the biggest, most immediate difference. For the time that they are in school they're almost as connected as kids who sit in our classrooms, too - until ours run off to text, MSN and play wifi games in the real world outside school. A few more machines and a small tip of the hat to services like Flickr, Wordpress and Flash Earth, and these kids might even have the enthusiasm for learning to beat our kids at their own game.
The beauty of the wind-up laptop is the operating system which runs on open-source free software. This allows children to configure their laptop in whichever way suits them best.
Posted by: Gill | February 16, 2007 at 12:14 PM