The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential – small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.
By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.
The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.
Linux is its own worst enemy: it’s splintered, it has different distributions, it’s too complex to run for most people.
I’m not good at selling laptops. I’m good at selling ideas.
The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.
The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.
I’m not against paying at all. What I’m against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it’s free, but you have to fill out this form.
Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.
This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
Young people, I happen to believe, are the world’s most precious natural resource.
Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.
I think life’s turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that.
It’s even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call.
Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there’s a morning shift and an afternoon shift.
The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.
I had come to a stage in life where I didn’t need to earn an income, I didn’t need to earn a reputation, I didn’t need fame, I didn’t need any of the things you might want in your early career.
Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.
Books are the province of romantics and humanists, not heartless nerds.