This is impossible to keep up with. Great session on the Media Lab's $100 Laptop. Michail Bletsas and Michael Brown. Highlights:

• 50% of the world's kids don't have electricity at home
• learning happens not just with teachers - learning happens with communicating and doing
• the internet was not meant to be mediated by servers (Shades of Mark Bernstein's puzzlement at educators' concern about hosting from edBlogger 2003. Is there never any progress?)
• main goal is to get the kids to create their own content
• teachers are the bottleneck - building a teacher infrastructure is a waste of time, they learn slower - best to get them out of the way

And OK, OK, once again the emphasis on hand-helds, on cell phones. I resist and resist and it's probably time to cave in and buy one. For what - spam students with news of new library books? spam staff with news of summer tech training opportunities? Hah!

Loved that notion of teacher as bottleneck. Certainly true in my experience both here and in China. With all of the present focus on standards and accountability, the space for a bottleneck-resisting teacher is limited anyway.