Two different education magazines refused to publish this article about the One Laptop Foundation’s heroic efforts to produce a low-cost, rugged, low-power personal laptop computer for some of the world’s poorest children. This rejection was a contributing factor to me ending my relationship with one magazine after more than a decade while a second magazine accused the column of being irrelevant to educators.
One editor was concerned that the article “might offend potential advertisers” and refused publication even after ample documentation was provided to support my claims.
Read The Best Way to Make Enemies… Do the Impossible and see what all of the controversy is about. Please share your thoughts here on my blog!
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
And we all know that those magazines are only loaded with relevant articles. It would be bad to tick off those guys who write those advertisements disguised as articles and take up too many pages of a publication.
It is a good piece. I hope many take advantage of the opportunity to help out. Keep up the good fight, Gary.
Your article does hit home with me. I would love to move my district 1:1 away from the Apple platform to the XO. Currently, we are using local funds and no grants to pay for our 1:1. It covers grades 6-8. However, I could actually purchase machines for grades 1-8 and have a viable 1:1. However, the stigma of the XO being on Linux and open source is the sticking point.
The Intel attempt to smash the XO with its Classmate product is a clear sign of the hostility in this market. What is truly sad is how Intel views these students in remote areas as a market and do not have learning or education at the heart of their product.
If I had it my way, the XO would be the machine for this district. It is great though that you can still get your message out through to us through Twitter and your blog. I found great value in your article and would appreciate more of the same.
This seems like ridiculous censorship for fear of offending intel & microsoft.
Thanks for including our http://www.laptops4kids.net site in the article. Even if it did get cut.