When you write, as I do, about learning and technology, there are certain names that come up again and again.

These are some of the Hot Names that I mention in The Connected Family.

Not all of them are people who agree with me, and I certainly don't agree with all of them. I name them here so that you can learn more about them yourselves and make up your own mind.

David Elkind p. 99	David Elkind is a psychologist who has eloquently criticized the practice of rushing children into school-like activities in his book The Hurried Child.
Bill Gates pp. 10, 73	Bill Gates is Chairman and CEO of the Microsoft Corporation, one of the most powerful software development companies in the world. Chances are you use one or more of Microsoft's products yourself on a daily basis. Recently, Bill Gates published a book entitled The Road Ahead, in which he makes many statements about what he sees as the future of education. I worry that many of Gates' predictions about the future value technical achievement for its own sake, and are, at heart, very materialistic.
Alan Kay pp. 30, 190	Alan Kay had a big hand in inventing many of the good things you associate with personal computers (including the name). He is fond of saying that people use the word "technology" only to describe what was invented after they were born. That's why we never argue about whether the piano is corrupting music with technology.
Nicholas Negroponte pp. 14, 43	Nicholas Negroponte is a great friend of mine with whom it has been my pleasure to work for many years. Nicholas founded the MIT Media Laboratory, and is widely renowned as a writer, lecturer and thinker. Nicholas' most recent book, Being Digital, was published in 1995. He is also a senior columnist for WIRED magazine.
Jean Piaget pp. 41, 66, 107, 162, 184	Jean Piaget was a Swiss scientist-philosopher-psychologist who is one of this century's most important thinkers about learning. After I finished my studies at Cambridge in 1958, I went to the University of Geneva to work with Piaget until 1963.
Neil Postman p. 46	Neil Postman is one of today's sharpest critics of foolishness in education and in the media. He is the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Amusing Ourselves to Death.