Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.

The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply.

Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.

A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.

Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007.

The city's school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

School board members decided that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum "should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory," said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

Last month, when the board examined its science curriculum, language was added calling for "various models/theories" of origin to be incorporated.

The decision provoked more than 300 biology and religious studies faculty members to write a letter last week urging the board to reverse the policy. It follows a letter from 43 deans at Wisconsin public universities.

"Insisting that teachers teach alternative theories of origin in biology classes takes time away from real learning, confuses some students and is a misuse of limited class time and public funds," said Don Waller, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In a large and growing number of schools around the country, students are learning more than just reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are learning what character education advocates call the fourth and fifth R’s: respect and responsibility.

The formal teaching of morals and values is not a new phenomenon; rather, it has been part of democratic thought throughout history. Plato and Aristotle in the Greece of the 4th century B.C.E. believed the role of education was to train good and virtuous citizens. John Locke, the 17th-century democratic philosopher, believed that learning was secondary to virtue. "Reading and writing and learning I allow to be necessary, but yet not the chief business of education. I imagine you would think him a very foolish fellow, that should not value a virtuous or a wise man infinitely before a great scholar."

Globally networked, easy-to-use computers can enhance learning, but only within an educational environment that encourages students to question "facts" and seek challenges.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has remarked that education in the 20th century is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant and being fed the menu. He meant that representations of ideas have replaced the ideas themselves; students are taught superficially about great discoveries instead of being helped to learn deeply for themselves.

In the near future, all the representations that human beings have invented will be instantly accessible anywhere in the world on intimate, notebook-size computers. But will we be able to get from the menu to the food? Or will we no longer understand the difference between the two? Worse, will we lose even the ability to read the menu and be satisfied just to recognize that it is one?

There has always been confusion between carriers and contents. Pianists know that music is not in the piano. It begins inside human beings as special urges to communicate feelings. But many children are forced to "take piano" before their musical impulses develop; then they turn away from music for life. The piano at its best can only be an amplifier of existing feelings, bringing forth multiple notes in harmony and polyphony that the unaided voice cannot produce.

The computer is the greatest "piano" ever invented, for it is the master carrier of representations of every kind. Now there is a rush to have people, especially schoolchildren, "take computer." Computers can amplify yearnings in ways even more profound than can musical instruments. But if teachers do not nourish the romance of learning and expressing, any external mandate for a new "literacy" becomes as much a crushing burden as being forced to perform Beethoven's sonatas while having no sense of their beauty. Instant access to the world's information will probably have an effect opposite to what is hoped: students will become numb instead of enlightened.

In addition to the notion that the mere presence of computers will improve learning, several other misconceptions about learning often hinder modern education. Stronger ideas need to replace them before any teaching aid, be it a computer or pencil and paper, will be of most service. One misconception might be called the fluidic theory of education: students are empty vessels that must be given knowledge drop by drop from the full teacher-vessel. A related idea is that education is a bitter pill that can be made palatable only by sugarcoating-a view that misses the deep joy brought by learning itself.

Another mistaken view holds that humans, like other animals, have to make do only with nature's mental bricks, or innate ways of thinking, in the construction of our minds. Equally worrisome is the naive idea that reality is solely what the senses reveal. Finally, and perhaps most misguided, is the view that the mind is unitary, that it has a seamless "I"-ness. Quite the contrary. Minds are far from unitary: they consist of a patchwork of different mentalities.

Bill Cosby went off on another tirade against the black community Thursday, telling a room full of activists that black children are running around not knowing how to read or write and "going nowhere."

He also had harsh words for struggling black men, telling them: "Stop beating up your women because you can't find a job."

Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity presents a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cross cultural setting. The scoring is based not upon the content or the subject material, but instead on the mathematical complexity of hierarchical organization of information. The subject’s performance on a task of a given complexity represents the stage of developmental complexity.

All this week in Next News, I am writing about the wisdom of human enhancement, an issue also tackled in the current issue related story of U.S. News & World Report. In my story, all of the anti-enhancement folks I quote tend to land on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But there are also liberals who are against some prospective forms of enhancement. Prof. George Annas, a bioethicist at Boston University, has repeatedly taken issue with the idea of germline engineering, which would involved tinkering with genes in eggs or sperm. The modified genes, according to the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit that encourages the use of certain human genetic technologies, would appear "not only in any children that resulted from such procedures, but in all succeeding generations ... and open the door to the alteration of the human species." I recently E-mailed Annas about his concerns with germline engineering and why he is pushing for an international treaty to ban inheritable modifications to the human genome. His brief responses:

Next News: What most worries you about this sort of genetic tinkering?

NEWTON, Mass., May 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoesis Studios announced today it has appointed David Blohm to its Board of Directors and Professor John D. Mayer, Professor Pattie Maes and Kevin Mowrer to the company's Strategic Advisory Board.

According to Ellen Bossert, chief executive officer, Zoesis, "These visionaries will ensure that Zoesis is synonymous with meaningful, enriching, educational products that appeal to parents and children alike. Their talent will further support the company's mission of bringing seemingly alive, emotional digital characters to children on a broad basis."

When Jacqueline Turner's daughter Riley was only 8 months old, she could let her mother know she was thirsty for milk by pumping her fingers against her palm. Or that she wanted more cereal by touching her fingertips together. Or ask for a ball, or her stuffed dog, or a book — all without saying a word. She used hand gestures taught to her by her mother.

Why teach signs to a baby who is not deaf? Mrs. Turner, a Spanish-language interpreter from Beaverton, said she bought a book and video about teaching signs to babies to help eliminate the frustration Riley had in not being able to communicate, as well as Mrs. Turner's own frustration in not understanding her.

The old adage "seeing is believing" hardly applies to nanoscience, which operates on a scale of atoms and molecules. So how do you make something so miniscule and abstract appear real to the ordinary eye?
Why not through art?

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.
- Hodding Carter

Bill Gates believes that one of the problems with America's high schools is that they are too big to allow for meaningful connections.

Putting his Microsoft-generated money where his mouth is, he announced last week a $51.2 million effort to create 67 small high schools in New York City. These smaller schools, he said on National Public Radio, will improve both learning and graduation rates, because they will be more focused, more responsive and will provide more personal and emotional connections between students and faculty.

"Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember."
- Martin Amis