Actually, that kind of thing DOES happen. At the turn of the 19th/20th century, getting a bicycle made you smarter, because it allowed you to go beyond the boundaries of your village or neighborhood.

The same held for books, newspapers, and radios/TV sets. Giving people cheap books (moveable print), newspapers and journals, bicycles, radios, TV, cars, they developed a much broader level of intellectual endeavor. That is even true when most content is kitchen maid literature and most communication is chatter.

In general, whenever you give people the ability to travel or communicate more and better, they get smarter. In a deep sense, this idea is also one of the foundations of the OLPC.

I'd suggest anyone wondering about the role of education in the the less-developed nations take a look at some of the findings of Dr. James Tooley. I think it's possible to infer the importance of computers in education from Dr. Tooley's findings as well.

In the developing world, there is an acknowledged "wave" of young children flooding the education system (due in part to better health care etc). I have seen reports by UNESCO stating that we do not have enough resources (schools, teachers and just plain money) to provide universal education for these children if we keep trying to educate them in the traditional way. UNESCO strongly suggest that ICT must play a part in meeting this challenge, or we will have children that have never gone to school. This is true today in the Pacific with many countries having only a 50% attendance rate and even if they do get to school, the quality of education is doubtful due to lack of appropriately trained teachers. The challenge is to feed ICT into this equation as part of the solution. IMHO, OLPC is one of the best ways to do this.

Ian

But I wonder what is the basis for believing that the resource will be efficiently used? Efficient use of resources is not after all that normal in many places. Preservation of assets sometimes, but utilizing the maximum potential is not something that happens in many fields in the developing world (agriculture, business, you name it).

In villages with little connection to the outside world and their own values, how do we know that the laptops might not simply turn into status symbols, or that we just look at the games instead of learning the maths behind them… Huge amounts of anthropology questions thrown up here really…

And as this is indeed completely new technology don't we really need to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on here in order to achieve an acceptable return on the technology?

What would you say in the US if the government advocated spending $23,450 to buy something you that you didn't have definitive evidence of it's benefit for children in school? There'd be outrage.

And if you take a very conservative laptop + $50 cost and a GDP per capita of a country in the developing world of $500, so the laptop is half of an average annual income (per child over 4-5 years mean time to failure)…

I'm sure that done carefully we can achieve results that more than justify that spending … but let's not waste children for getting it wrong.

My vision isn’t the best, so I really like the ability to change the text size. I use the text-to-speech feature at times. I’ve shown it to one kid who is dyslexic and he volunteered that he thinks it would be helpful to him. I showed it to a girl who also has a reading problem. I downloaded a sample of Twilight for her to try and switched on the text-to-speech. She couldn’t put the Kindle down, reading along with the audio. Her parents were very pleased and I’m sure they ordered a Kindle within a day or two.

People universally have thanked me for showing them this product.

Mostly, that Mary is more likely to be able to answer your specific questions.

Rob