Negroponte on OLPC / The World Bank on Mobile Innovation

Yesterday I was at the IDB for "Reinventing the Classroom: Social and Educational Impact of ICTs in Education."  I wrote yesterday about CEIBAL, Urugay's initiative to distribute laptops to every student and teacher in the public school system.  Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of One Laptop Per Child, followed that with a firey talk in the afternoon.

NegroponteThe mission of education, Negroponte reminded his audience, isn't teaching, it's learning. What happens inside the classroom is only a part of the story, and hand-wringing over how to train the teachers to teach the students is silly and a waste of time. Often as not, the students learn to use the laptops themselves, and will teach their parents and each other. There is nobody at this table, he said, who wouldn't buy a laptop for our own child if we could afford it.  To get hung up on assessing the impact of the program is just a waste of time.

Now, clearly, the reality of the world we live in requires impact assessments. And clearly, we can't just drop a stack of laptops on a school in some remote village without any kind of training or introduction. But Negroponte has some inspiring and compelling words nonetheless.

Today's excitemeDevelopmentent is at the World Bank, where the e-Development program is hosting "Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation." Check out the agenda, or watch online, which will be keeping me distracted until I go over to the Bank for the afternoon sessions.

In the opening session, Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave consulting, had a pretty interesting presentation about the broad opportunity for mobile in the developing world. To really make sServices work to improve billions of lives in the develping world will require new innovation-- but the innovation that is required is not in IT, but in mastering the business models that can create successful projects and bring them to scale.