I double-checked, and the date on this story is April 4, so this is probably not an April Fools' joke, although I appreciate the 4/1 postings. Google's sports drink beta test was my favorite spoof this year. [http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1728]
Anyway, looks like Negroponte and a few other MIT folks are thinking of atoms as well as bits in designing super-cheap (>100-USD) laptop computers for use worldwide. From the story:
Okay ... uh, so they're making $100- lightbulbs? And where are they going to juice their batteries up? I just bought a hand-crank radio, and it gets old making electron juice for hourly NPR updates. Anyway, I wanted to add two cents from the Utopia-on-the-Charles that is MIT.
Michael
definitely not April Fool's
Wired has a news piece today.
Alpha SmartBoards
I think the technological (grand-?) parents of these devices are the Apple-manufactured Alpha SmartBoards. They were, if I recall correctly, about $100, had 512K of memory and a tiny LCD screen and ran for a good long time on AA batteries, and worked just fine for saving lots and lots of text: a professor let me borrow one and try it out, and I actually wound up writing portions of one of my prelims papers on it. One account of the possibilities offered by these super-cheap computers appears in an essay by Charlie Moran and Patricia Hunter, "Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change," in Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet, Ward and Taylor, eds., with the main point being this: pedagogically speaking, we do a lot better when we spend as much money on teacher training with technologies as we spend on the technologies themselves.
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Mike
http://www.vitia.org/