http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ketaki-desai/one-laptop-per-child_b_1417801.html
Once again, the Huffington Post has provided me with an interesting article to debate. The brain trusts at Carnegie Mellon have come up with a very lofty goal of reaching communities across the world and through companies within the communities they will provide laptops to the students. They provide a multi-step program in order to have the students feel ownership over their technology. They will have software developers collaborate and offer software to the students and provide the students with an international forum in which they can discuss the benefits and detractors of provided software.
The idea of the forum is to provide cross-cultural learning, and the laptops provide students education inside and outside of the classroom. That is a nice ideal but it seems far fetched and a bit dangerous. This forum is more or less the world's biggest chat room and if it is not closely monitored (which then takes away the freedom the students have to interact with each other) then there are many dangers - predators, exploitation, voyeurism/exhibition, so many things that we fight to keep our students away from on a daily basis.
Does this plan seem like a far reaching goal or a sound beginning to a global community for our students?
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