This is the Computer and Information Age.

We are in the computer and information age. Paper is out and computers are in, in fact they are the latest in learning tools, even offered to students like pencils, one to every child in the world.

A Delaware group called OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) says that “Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all.” They liken the laptop to a pencil, and insist that in the computer and information age, there is no excuse for any child to be deprived of a computer.

Believing that computers at libraries and in the home for people to share are not enough, they say, “One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful,” and OLPC has begun providing computers to the children of the world. They are not the kind you plug in though, these are hand cranked.

In November 2005, Nicholas Negropont, the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Laboratory (as part of the OLPC project,) introduced the first Linnux-based, hand-cranked, networked laptop computer at a World Summit meeting demonstrating a working to the Secretary General of the United Nations. According to MIT’s Media Lab website, the laptops would “be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.”

The plan of MIT was to sell the laptops to governments that in turn would issue them to children all over the globe and in particular, developing nations. The projected initial cost was supposed to be $100.00 per unit but it has gone up over time. First to $140.00 per unit and as of this writing it is 400.00 to give or receive an XO machine, (as they are called.) As in the beginning of the project, OLPC still believes that it is worth it to get technology into the hands of every child, in fact, OLPC says that with it, “nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.”

The OLPC program is now in full production and children from all over the world have a laptop in front of them. Connected to the computer and the programs they run, they are liberated from a black and white world of parent and teachers, blackboard and books. Parents and teachers, after all, even books, but the computer is a window to the world. No longer limited by location or time differences, the world is at their fingertips.

OLPC knows that a nation's most precious natural resource is its children. They believe that with these “highly programmable” tools for exploring the world in their hands, children, “even in the most remote regions of the globe will be given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.”