The $100 Laptop and the Mouse Army

If you follow technology news at all, you are probably aware that Nicolas Negroponte went very public with M.I.T.’s $100 laptop project at last week’s Emerging Technologies Conference.

This remarkable device is wireless, uses static memory, can be cranked to provide power, is built for durability and will run open-source software. Just what I’ve been clamoring for (and predicting – see Turning the Page: E-books and their impact on libraries, School Library Journal, November 2004).

Yeah, I’d be delighted if I could provide such contraptions to all my Mankato students. But we are not the target market for them. Negroponte wants to offer them (by the millions) to students in developing countries - Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand are supposedly already on board.

With this announcement, Neal Stephenson’s science fiction book The Diamond Age is proving once again eerily prescient. (I just love it when science fiction does that!) Set in a future Hong Kong, Stephenson’s world is Neo-Victorian, thoroughly stratified by class. It has also mastered nanotechnologies and an amazing “e-book” A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer has been compiled for the daughter of a very rich industrialist. A copy of the book falls into the hands of an Oliver-Twistian young woman, who uses its educational powers to survive a terrifying childhood.

What I had forgotten until re-reading the book recently was that lots of copies of the Primer were made and given to a group of the most dispossessed members of Diamond Age society – unwanted Chinese girls, abandoned at birth and raised in an orphanage. Using the power of this e-book, they too are able to learn and become a political and physical force – The Mouse Army.

It’s my sense that Negroponte with his $100 laptop project has the same goal – to create great Mouse Armies of the world’s disposed, disrupting the political structures in which the few, rich and powerful rule over the many, poor and powerless. If that is his aim, I’m all for it.

While I have grown terribly cynical about the ability of politics, religion or science to solve major world problems, I still believe in the power of education to end poverty, violence, and depredation of natural resources. I still hold Horatio Alger’s advice close – that through the dint of hard work, good moral character, and perseverance, anyone can lift him/herself out of poverty. But I would have to add “through on-going education” to Alger’s success formula. I see little hope for this world except in creating a better-educated population.

Mr. Negroponte, I hope you create many, many Mouse Armies.

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1 Comment »
I feel compelled to incite the Mouse Armies. I could see some wonderful blogs going with this. I have been following with great interest this $100 laptop phenom. Whenever I demonstrate a cool website, I give my 3rd and 4th graders nifty business card sized papers and remind them that they can go to the public library and look up this FOR FREE! Many of my students from non-English backgrounds are introducing their parents to “cool sites” based on these tiny cards. Unobtrusive, looks like everybody elses and useful. Sounds like a winner.

Comment by Diane Chen — October 1, 2005 @ 2:42 pm