Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they... can never be without some element of education.
Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.
Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient's point of view, that's zero.
We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.
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.
If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.
The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.
Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.
