Are Some OLPC Mission Statements More Equal?
Posted on May 31, 2008 by Edward Cherlin in People: Negroponte
At the recent OLPC Country Workshop on May 20, 2008, Nicholas Negroponte rather curiously stated that the OLPC mission statement "has not changed one ounce." Then he introduced a fourth version of the mission statement, entirely different from the previous three reported on OLPC News not long ago:
Mission
One Laptop per Child creates educational opportunity for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.
Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC
And pushed Microsoft into joining a primarily Open Source project. And created a new market segment, ultra-low-cost laptops, where there is more Linux than Windows on offer. So we have to admit that Nicholas is also a genius.
If you look at the history of the great founders of industries such as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, you will find the same kind of mixture of genius in some things, and serious incompetence in others. Anyway, this is an excellent mission statement.
The only problems with it are the constant chopping and changing from previous versions, the denial that this has happened, and the fact that this version doesn't mention Constructionism by name. Actually, I find it much more helpful to give a partial explanation of Constructionist teaching, and to skip the word.
I'm with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman's father, who taught his son that names don't matter. They have no inherent meaning. What matters, he taught, is behavior, a thoroughly Constructionist point of view. We're having a discussion of Constructionist teaching and learning behaviors on the more contentious thread. If you are confused about what Constructionism is supposed to be, you are not alone.
Here is Alan Kay's explanation of how to do education with XOs. All of what he says fits within Constructionism, but he doesn't need the word itself because he invented a lot of this behavior.
This is by far the best explanation I have seen of what we are about. You can also view other presentations from the same preview of the XO-2.
