When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of community involvement in creating software for educational tools.
Nicholas Negroponte highlights the crucial role of community collaboration in the development of educational technology, specifically referencing the need for collective software creation to support initiatives like the $100 laptop for children around the world. This underscores the idea that providing resources alone is insufficient without the active participation of the community, who are essential for making such technology truly effective and user-friendly.
Themes
CommunityEducationSoftwareTechnologyCollaboration
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the future of education technology, one might reference this quote to emphasize the role of community in educational initiatives.
More from Nicholas Negroponte
All quotes βWhere do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.
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Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
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I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
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Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
Nicholas NegroponteRead
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