Will the Internet definitively revolutionise the way of teaching?
Listen: when the first cars appeared in the nineteenth century, they were called “horseless carriages”. They were named for what they weren’t instead of for what they were! At first, they didn’t go much faster than horses, but they ended up changing the world much more than the telegraph did or what the telephone would do later. I say this because nowadays we spend hours talking about mobiles and the Internet but nobody knows what the next car will be. We’re still worried about the horse. Exactly. We don’t see what we don’t see! We admire desktop computers and they’re rubbish! They’re monsters that are extremely difficult to take anywhere, 50-year-old technology that doesn’t go where it should, which is what Donald Norman calls “the invisible computer”. But there are people working on these things. The laptop computer being designed by the One Laptop per Child project is not so ambitious… But what is the least intellectually relevant about this project is the hardware. Negroponte’s pro
