Sometimes an idea which can seem good in one context seems positively daft in another. There is an illustration of this in Lingamish’s treatment of the well intentioned, but ultimately unrealistic one laptop per child project. This project is a very good example of creating dependency, which I touched on here.
By the way, if you see seemingly random links scattered around here, it is a new plugin which finds books on Amazon related to the subjects we talk about. At the moment it only seems to find things in the US, despite being advertised to work with the UK office. I’ll see if I can fix that. Let me know if you have any thoughts about it.