Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.