Tech support?
What difference does technology make for the world’s poor? This question prompted sharply worded exchanges at a recent MIT public forum as researchers offered markedly differing views about the effectiveness of technological fixes for poverty.“The solution to poverty is education, and the way you get learning is in my mind very much connected to technology,” said Nicholas Negroponte at the Dec. 2 event. Negroponte is the co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and founder of the nonprofit group One Laptop per Child, which has distributed roughly 2 million laptop computers to children, mostly in South America, Africa and the Caribbean. “Technology has fundamentally changed things” in places with inadequate schooling, Negroponte asserted, citing examples of children who taught their parents to read using computers.Others were more circumspect about the impact of technology. Studies in India have shown that schools can better target the skill level of students either with or without...