The Virtual Peace Garden

Book orders are due soon, so I need to commit to some materials for a graduate seminar formally titled "Rhetorics and Poetics of New Media;" the actual course focus will be the "rhetorics" and "poetics" of OLPC.

I'm debating whether or not to assign some broad, background readings like Larry Cuban's Oversold and Underused: Computes in the Classroom, Banks' Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, even Negroponte's Being Digital. The alternative is to dive into the OLPC website materials, the stories in the press, even the blogs, and just figure out: what are people saying about the laptop, the deployments, the mission, the future.

Any suggestions? Feedback?