OLPC’s pilot Give One, Get One program is undergoing a radical transformation that could easily be called Give One, Give Again. In late January, an email went out to the OLPC community announcing that if any of their XO laptops were collecting dust in closets, they would reclaim them and send them to children in Haiti.

TED caught up with Nicholas Negroponte en route from Davos to Addis Ababa to talk about OLPC, rebuilding Haiti’s education system and the future of computers in schools.

TED: Is Haiti ready for an influx of OLPC laptops?

NN: Originally, the OLPC Foundation picked three charter countries to work with. Haiti was one of them. We already have fourteen or fifteen thousand laptops, a tech team and teaching group all ready in place, so we don’t have to tool up for it.

A giant fundraising program would be too slow. We’ve got this latent potential in unused machines. So instead of going for new ones that have to be manufactured, I said, let’s get the computers out of mothballs and into the hands of kids.

Even broken laptops are useful for spare parts.

TED: You raise an interesting point. When an OLPC laptop breaks, who fixes it? The developing world doesn’t exactly have a genius bar in every shopping district.

NN: Maintenance is addressed by the kids themselves. There are all sorts of maintenance manuals, and we encourage every kid to open up their laptops. A 12-year-old should be able to perform 95% of the repairs. The 5% that can’t be fixed are shipped back to us.

When we initially ship laptops to a town or school, for one reason or another 1% are dead on arrival, and that surplus 1% gets turned into spare parts.

TED: So many of the schools in Haiti have been destroyed, what good is OLPC?

NN: Even without schools, children can resume learning.

Nearly 100% of the schools in that region have been destroyed, and one of the things you can do is rethink school completely.

If we can send an OLPC to every kid in Haiti, that would completely change the face of education — and, potentially, we can do that in a matter of weeks or months. If we could do that before the end of the year, that would be really exciting, extraordinary. The only question that remains is how do we finance it.

The test has already happened in Uruguay. Every child in Uruguay has a laptop.

The program that just started is to get as many XOs as we can out of people’s closets and into kids’ hands immediately.

TED: Does it have to be the XO? There are a lot of alternatives on the market now. Netbooks …

NN: I don’t care what laptop they use, but if every child gets a computer it could change education.

TED: Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad yesterday. What are your impressions? Aren’t you working on a tablet OLPC? How would the two compare?

NN: The iPad will be a great product. It’s a nice way to read. More people will sleep with iPads than sleep with people, but it’s too heavy and too thick with too much bezel.

Our designs are thinner, with no bezel. The XO 3.0 is scheduled to come out in two years, and we want it to do a better job with haptic response, with force feedback. That will be really important for the future of tablet computing.

If you have an unused or broken XO laptop, send it to:

OLPC FOR HAITI c/o Exel
615 Westport Parkway #500
Grapevine, TX 76051

An article in MIT’s Technology Review reports on a surprising new use for One Laptop Per Child’s user interface, Sugar. From the article:

The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender [...] “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”

Nicholas Negroponte, who has given many TEDTalks, says “Putting Sugar on a stick is absolutely the right thing to do.”

Legendary interviewer Patt Morrison ran a two-hour broadcast from TED today, pulling in a raft of TED speakers and TEDsters, including two of the 2009 TED Prize winners. In four segments, she asked some amazing questions and started up some cross-pollinating discussions: Shai Agassi and Ray Anderson discussing the green revolution; Alex Tabarrok and Robin Williams on economics (Alex’s specialty) and jokes (Robin’s); Nicholas Negroponte and Yves Behar (shown above during their interview) on design with a mission and the next $100 laptop; and the TED Prize, with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute and Sylvia Earle, oceanographer.

The broadcast is available as a podcast right here — look for the February 6 show.

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Watch Nicholas Negroponte’s 2008 talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances — including Negroponte’s talk at TED2006, just one week after he committed himself fully to One Laptop per Child for the rest of his life; and his eye-opening talk from the very first TED, in 1984, where he makes 5 predictions about the future (and 4 of them are right).

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One Laptop per Child designer Yves Behar (watch his TEDTalk) shares exciting news about the top-to-bottom redesign of the XO laptop — sometimes called the “$100 laptop.” He writes:

With the XO (1.0), we pushed the boundaries of what a laptop could be by lowering the cost dramatically, being green (no heavy metals, lowest energy consumption ever), and a human-driven unique design approach.

Now, with XOXO (2.0), we are challenging what a truly collaborative and creative computing experience could be … a true departure from the traditional keyboard and screen layout, a new way to interface and play with data, information and communication:

- imagine if your learning machine was an un-interrupted screen one could interface with from any direction
- imagine if it was a reading experience just like a book, and at the same time a seamless large visual tablet
- imagine if children could play board games sitting across from each other (or computer games).

The XOXO is a book, a tablet, a board…and yes, a laptop too if that is what you need. The design is still green and white, but thin, simple, and un-interrupted by keyboards, buttons, speaker holes, input devices and visible connectors. And it is soft to the touch, like a piece of luggage, everyday luggage you can take anywhere.

Planned for early 2010, the XOXO should be the next learning object of desire, from Bogota, to Istanbul, to New York.

Read more about the XO laptop and One Laptop per Child >>

TED founder Richard Saul Wurman had the foresight to record every conference he held. And I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to see the full archive for the first time: Richard had transferred all the original (Beta) tapes to DV; nearly all the talks — hundreds of them — were still intact. What a treasure trove!

Some of the footage requires restoration; and of course, the quality on the earliest talks isn’t what it is now. Still, what a thrill! To watch Frank Gehry’s talk from 1990, before the buildings he’s known for had been built … when he was still defending his work. Or to watch Nicholas Negroponte in 1984, before the MIT Media Lab had a proper home, before anyone was uttering the word “convergence.”

Negroponte’s talk — which hasn’t been seen for 24 years — was particularly meaningful for me to watch. Speaking for a full two hours (the famous 18-minute rule didn’t evolve till later), he waxed prophetic on our computer-mediated future, strongly foreshadowing CD-ROMs, websites, service kiosks, voice-recognition technology, computer-generated animation, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Though the technologies he referenced are largely defunct (optical discs, etc.), the concepts are shockingly relevant.

The other shock in Negroponte’s talk — for me anyway — was to realize just how advanced his team’s work was at MIT in the ’80s, and how unaware we were of it elsewhere. Watching Negroponte’s talk put my own career in context: I worked on a few prominent projects in the early ’90s (one of the earliest multimedia magazines in ’91; HotWired.com in ’94), and many of us were shockingly unfamiliar with the early work that had been done at MIT. But then, we had few ways of learning about it. We didn’t have the web in the ’80s and early ’90s; we didn’t even have Wired magazine yet. No wonder the world needed TED.

And now, for those of us who didn’t get to attend those early, formative years — and even for those of you who did — we’re bring the TED archives alive. Today, we’re releasing Negroponte’s first TEDTalk, from 1984 (actually, we’re releasing 25 minutes of key excerpts; the full two-hour talk will ultimately be made available for download, but must be restored in places). Later in the week, we’ll release Frank Gehry’s 1990 talk. And over time, look for more of the legendary talks that made TED what it was — and is: from Benoit Mandelbrot to Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock to Kai Krause. We hope you’re looking forward to it as much as we are!

Negroponte’s full 2-hour talk will be made available for download, but parts of it must be restored.

Watch Nicholas Negroponte’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

+ Share Ron Eglash‘s cool math tools, for studying math via breakdancing, Latin beats and cornrow braids
+ Dive into Richard Baraniuk‘s Connexions, a massive repository of open-source class materials
+ Visit Phil Borges‘ Bridges to Understanding site, which rounds up student films from all over the world
+ Browse Erin McKean‘s booklist “So You Want to Be a Lexicographer?“
+ Check out the beta of Gapminder World, powered by Hans Rosling‘s Trendalyzer software
+ Watch video and take action at The Hub, a platform for human rights media and action — presented by Peter Gabriel‘s WITNESS
+ Discuss sustainable design and materials on the Cradle to Cradle forums, inspired by the work of William McDonough
+ Learn more about Nicholas Negroponte‘s One Laptop per Child
+ Catch up with Majora Carter‘s Sustainable South Bronx — or make a specific gift to SSBx via Changing the Present
+ Calculate your personal CO2 production — and start helping the planet — at the website for Al Gore‘s An Inconvenient Truth, produced by Jeff Skoll

TEDTalks is full of ideas for making change for oneself and for others — many more than we can list here. Please share your suggestions for other TEDTalks-inspired change!

The XO laptop is now here. The cost at this stage is nearly double, but the machine is awesome. Mass production started earlier this month in a Quanta manufacturing plant near Shanghai, and while a few countries such as Uruguay and Mongolia will buy them bulk and distribute them in schools, you — but only if you live in the US and Canada — can also buy one until November 26. Actually, two: you can get one if you donate another one to a child in a developing nation. Smart idea. Total cost: $399 plus shipping, with $200 considered a tax-deductible donation. Go to the Give One Get One site. Twelve days to go. Expectations are that the first release of 25’000 will sell out pretty fast.