A new toy for kids is born

There has been important news lately regarding the ambitious program to provide public school children with laptop computers. Due to the increased interest of the regional countries in this matter, more than 20 models have been added to Negroponte´s original OLPCs. All of these products are geared towards creating a new market and competing in it. There are already people that are predicting that we are being faced with a tool that may generate another technological revolution, such as what iPod has done with the modern world.
While the Brazilian government has already declared interest in giving a laptop to each one of the 55 million children in the public education system, the Uruguayan government has already launched its program to give each school-aged child a classroom laptop by 2009. At the same time, in Chile, the Classmate PC (a low-cost Intel model) has been included into the State purchases systems, which means that the public schools can buy them directly. Other similar situations are happening in Colombia and Costa Rica. David Buckingham thinks that in today’s world there is a gap between the pop-culture of children and the school’s culture, and adds that "if the schools aren't able to connect with the ever-changing orientations and motivations that young people have regarding learning, there will be a great danger that the official learning institutions will be totally left out of their lives".
It so happens that the industrial society school model is in crisis, not only in our country but in many first-world countries as well.
The program (which is still called OLPC) offers us, for the first time, the opportunity to review the crisis model and opens us up for a transformation, for a techno-educational leap of extraordinary characteristics. This is meant for our children (in a non-discriminatory manner) to start off young in the information society, which is the heir of the industrial society.
The new Argentine National Education Act status that "if the New Information Technologies are ways of thinking, interacting and being informed, the schools must take on the responsibility of these new cultural experiences and incorporate and use them productively."
However, the formal public education in our country still shows a very obvious backwardness that is in contrast with the ease of access to the New Information Technologies that the kids have access to nowadays, even in the poorest areas.
The most seductive part of what the society of information and knowledge offers us is the concrete possibility of multiplying our human relationships and free-access to knowledge. Neither children nor formal education can be left out of this process because it is a tool that provides them with more and better opportunities to handle themselves in the world.
It is not an easy task of getting computers to children. Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli keep us updated with the project's details, and it’s a good thing that this process is done with such transparency. This way there is a higher level of prestige as well as more people adhering to the program.
The path chosen, for now, is that of open-source software. Within this area we can find our friends, the Tuquito, who have already designed an open-source version for Intel's Classmate PCs (available online) and they have finished the base software for the OPLCs and are currently working on developing the applications. Lawrence Lessing states that we are products of a generation that is passive when faced with cultural subjects "it's something that we consume (the more channels the better)", but he affirms that "kids have a different attitude, they are active, creative and remix cultural concepts."
This is the game of their day.