[Air-l] India Rejects One Laptop Per Child

[David Brake]

I was just listening to Negroponte talking about the OLPC at the TED  
Talks back in February and he said to my astonishment, "When you see  
that kind of thing [referring to favourable reports of trials of  
conventional laptops after 3.5 years in Maine], this is not something  
you have to test - the days of pilot projects are over. When people  
say 'well we'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to  
see how it works' - screw you. Go to the back of the line - someone  
else will do it and then when you figure out that this works you can  
join as well."

I know that he has now resigned as chair of the Media Lab to run the  
OLPC project and he is understandably passionate about it but to say  
that because of a few small-scale pilots of different kinds in  
different developed and developing world countries, there can be no  
doubt his radically different design of laptop will work in any given  
country is just irresponsible.

I only hope this is merely hyperbole on his part and not typical of  
the attitude of the whole organization. It seems that Nigeria has  
decided to gamble that Negroponte is right (http://allafrica.com/ 
stories/200607120369.html).

(See http://groupblog.workasone.net/archives/2006/06/the-100-laptop- 
debate/ for more on the OLPC project).

Incidentally, I find I am listening to more and more academic  
podcasts and I am not sure how to cite them.  At the moment I guess  
that this one should be treated as a conference proceeding -  
something like this:

Negroponte, N. (2006) "Ted Talk: Nicholas Negroponte". in New York,  
February, 2006,   http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/

But that doesn't tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesnt  
tell you that the part I cited is 5 minutes, 42 seconds in. This  
useful guide to Harvard citation http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/library/ 
using/harvard_system.html says BS:5605:1990 http://www.mamc.ac.in/ 
British.pdf doesnt include recommendations for electronic sources. Is  
there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with  
standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my  
own style?

---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London  
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ 
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/  
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
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