- - - -
The goal is 4 simple words: Change how kids learn. The word "laptop" is conspicuously missing.
At first in childrens' lives, learning comes from curiousity. You go through your day and ask parents and peers. Happens all day and everywhere.
One day (and you really can determine that single day), things change. When you enter school, learning is driven by authority figure, not curiosity; it's unidirectional and happens in a particular place.
This can work great if you have a great teacher. If you have a lousy teacher it works not so well; with no teacher it doesn't work at all.
OLPC people considered a big, top-down rethinking of how schools in general are supposed to work, and develop a global curriculum. A super-optimistic person might think could succeed in 50-100 years. (Speaker doesn't think it'd ever work.)
They wish to get peer learning back into the picture. Get learning driven by curiosity again, and let children be able to get answers even if teacher doesn't know or isn't there.
OLPC people are impatient. How to do this now?
Laptops are one way they could try fixing one thing and let schooling (different from education!) fix itself over time.
(Afterwards, the talk is fairly technical.)