The mockup I saw was about the size of a large paperback book. There's a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the mockup was detachable, but will probably fold out on a hinge. The system is designed to work in three modes: laptop mode (screen up, keyboard down, handle behind as a stand); book mode (screen on the front, keyboard on the back, comfortable indentation for holding it in the left hand. Pressing on the keyboard "accordian-stype" - as Negroponte puts it - allows for page scrolling); and game mode (screen in the front, keyboard in the back, held sideways, like an oversized PSP. Two trackballs, surrounded by four way buttons, on each side of the screen act as controls, and function keys on the back act as additional buttons.)...There's a lot more to the post - you should go check it out.
My questions largely had to do with how the laptop would be used in the classroom. I made the mistake of asking a question of how the laptop would be used as "a teaching tool"... like Papert, Negroponte's a big believer that students simply need access to technology and can use it to teach each other and to make discoveries themselves. When I expressed some skepticism about teachers' willingness to use the computers in the classroom, he referenced Maine governor Angus King's initiative to bring computers into middle school classrooms throughout the state. Initially unpopular with teachers, the laptop project is now widely viewed as a success and is being replicated in other states. It's clear that the strategy behind the device is a trojan horse one - sell the device as an e-book, then see what students are able to do with a flexible, net-connected, programmable tool.
But I'd like to return to the point I highlited above - the idea that all that's necessary is to wire up students, and let them play. I'm a huge fan of letting children direct their own learning, absolutely. But if Negroponte sees this project as a way of changing the way we educate, rather than a way of making it easier/better/cheaper, it's going to fail. Simple as that. Even if we ignore the institutional roadblocks, the fact is that students need to be taught. You'd think we'd have figured this out by now, but it's bizarre how prevalent the idea that you could just drop Jimmy in a library and he'd do fine is.
A connected, cheap laptop makes this problem worse, not better. Anyone who seriously thinks the Internet is an educational tool needs their head examined. Unless we want to chuck multiplication tables in favour of teaching schoolchildren the finer points of [insert offensive content here], the fact is that the volume of information available on the Internet makes an intelligent guide more necessary, not less.
During the reign of the Harris Tories (Allah, let them never return) one of the more ridiculous assertions I heard semi-frequently was that public education itself was obsolete. (I have friends who I respect, but strongly disagree with on this point. I am doing a disservice to some of them, who've put more thought in to it than this.) According to this theory, the fact that Harris ruined my entire high school experience was okay, because the next generation would be able to get their education from computers, without any teachers at all - but first, the teachers union had to be destroyed, apparently..
Frankly, I think Arthur C. Clarke dealt with this quite simply. In his book 1984: Spring, Clarke wrote that computers can't replace teachers - nothing can. What they hold the potential of is freeing up teachers from one part of their job - conveying information - so that they can deal with the more important one: attending to students who are having difficulty, and encouraging the more advanced students. In this, he (and I suppose I as well) disagrees with Bucky Fuller, who seems to have believed that new telecommunications technologies would allow a greater amount of distance learning. However, as far as I can remember Fuller never really said whether he expected computers to displace teachers. Perhaps there's less disagreement here than I think.
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