Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

AI-driven device created in Diamond Age that acts as coach-via-StoryTelling for some young women. (Educational Technology)

If you own one of Amazon’s e-readers, there’s a good chance you’ve accessed the “Manage Your Kindle” page at some point... Do you notice anything strange about that URL?.... What’s fiona?... the lodestone for Amazon’s efforts, in the early 2000s, to develop an e-reader. In his chronicle of the company, Brad Stone writes: “The early [Kindle] engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating.”

The teaching software for the One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) wis directly inspired by the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". It is even named "Nell" (after the main protagonist in the novel). Dvice.com posted an example of how children in a remote Ethiopian village use Nell. Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods.