Sunday, January 6, 2008

Intel Quits OLPC

Well, the Intel and OLPC partnership is over now - Intel quit this partnership over "philosophical differences" with Nicholas Negroponte. Could it be the child-centered nature of the OLPC, or the open architecture, or something else? Competition of different devices is cited by some articles, requiring only one device. My personal bias is I want more kids to have laptops, having seen the power and possibilities of self-directed learning when every child a laptop or tablet.

2 comments:

John Case said...

Pam,
I'm sure that Intel figured out they couldn't make any money by supporting a device with an AMD processor in it. Gee, didn't see this one coming.

Pamela Livingston said...

Yes, well there's that, isn't there. Thanks for your comment, John.

Interestingly, a lot of people are saying how OLPC jump-started the development of small computing devices. Here's what Dr. Seymour Papert said when I interviewed him back in 2005:

"Another possibility is that the OLPC example will incite the independent development of different low-cost machines. If this happens, we'll say, "More power to them," rather than see them as competition. The goal of OLPC is not to dominate the market for hardware and software but to see computers get into the hands of the children of the world." (Dr. Seymour Papert quoted in "1-to-1 Learning: Laptop Programs That Work", Livingston, P., ISTE 2006, page 7)

Well, the competition happened, didn't it!