I found a link to this video yesterday in Jimbo Wales’s post surrendering his editing privileges. Wales said it “moved [him] deeply” and was why he felt so strongly about wanting Wikipedia to be above reproach.
I can’t speak to whether Wales’s actions were justified, but the 8-minute mini-documentary about a remote village in Peru is remarkably interesting. It includes some shots of students using green-and-white OLPC XO-1 laptops, and talking about how they learned to use them by exploring the applications.
The students said that if one of them discovered how to do something new, he would teach others how to do it, and they in turn would teach more. They also said that Wikipedia was an amazing resource, where they learned all sorts of new things.
See it after the jump.
Web: La Selva from Web on Vimeo.
There is also another, earlier short, which includes interview footage with Nicholas Negroponte about the OLPC project, and shows children in a mountain village getting handed their OLPCs and starting to use them. Both of these are introductions to a longer documentary, Web, which is a feature-length documentary film about the universal connectivity provided by the Internet and how it affects the developing world, that will be released in spring, 2011.
Definitely worth watching.
Web: La Sierra from Web on Vimeo.
There’s also a 3-minute trailer for the movie as a whole.
Web: Original Trailer from Web on Vimeo.