A Hopeful Idea Hopelessly Mired?

One of the ongoing stories in the web 2.0 world that this weblog has kept an eye on is Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child program. Most of that though has been outside the main parameters of this weblog. The Fast Company article One Laptop Per Child: Failure is not an Option is listed under Paradigm Pathways Web 2.0 Pathways. All About Yves - Fuseproject - One LapTop per Child - Masters of a Design can be found under the del.icio.us tagging system. Back in October of last year Cognitive Daily had the following post Is the "$100 laptop" headed for a flop? by Dave Munger which had a response from me.

Now OLPC is back in the news.

Intel Breaks Up with OLPC | Epicenter from Wired.com

After close to a year of trading insults Intel finally joined Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child Initiative last July. The move came as a surprise to many, not only because of the bad blood between the chipmaker and the nonprofit, but also because Intel was, and is, working on a similar project called The World Ahead. Yet with Intel officially joining the OLPC board and offering to supply CPUs for the next iteration of the nonprofit's low-cost laptops, it appeared the beef between the two parties over who was going to save the world with low-cost, easily deployed computers seemed to be over.

More from the New York Times TECHNOLOGY | January 5, 2008
Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children
Intel and the One Laptop Per Child group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children.

No Child Left Offline - Nicholas Negroponte - OLPC - Intel
The Fast Interview: MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte on Intel's "dishonesty" and the long, tough road to the $100 laptop.

One of three looks at the One Laptop Per Child program. This program has had an up and down track record since its inception. . Yet the 'optimism' of the social-entrepreneur set never seems to diminish. Is it realistic? More importantly if it is not and this program is hitting a dead-end, what went wrong? Is there anything actually wrong or is it that in today's instant gratification media not having a quickly completed success is seen as the same thing as a failure?

I am providing additional websites for background information in an online Ask.com MyStuff folder OLPC.

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