OLPC is not “revolutionalizing” education:

If 40 countries adopt an approach that seems so far fetched to the entrenched in barely 30 months of roll out, with zero marketing budget, what will we call that? If a couple million people start using it with the sheer persuasion of evangelism, what should we call that? I have helped a few schools pilot and just the joy on the face of the children and to help a child say a word in more language than one, to think 1, 11, 111, 1111 rather than 1,2,3,4 or play with the games they could not have imagined and learn letters and numbers faster than anything one has seen and a hundred other things that children try to do with it- all that does add up to something quite different from what we had seen before. Even if the OLPC laptop were to be transitioned to something else after the first year, just the change it brings about is way beyond what a normal computer can do at a multiple of OLPC XO's cost. Consider this, the existing school system gets about 5000 out of about 3 million to score over 2350 in SAT scores.. Shall we pronounce it a total failure then? What OLPC achieves is far more remarkable. It lets an uninterested child begin learning learning. That alone is well worth a name like revolution indeed!

OLPC did not spawn the netbook:

I thought in these days and times, facts need not be debated. If Chanana does not feel so, so be it. Let the rest of the world sit in judgment on that. It may be fair to say that without OLPC, the net-books may have been born a couple years later or may be the thought may not have crossed. Considering Michael Dell seemed to think that was impractical until OLPC began its distribution and Net-books surfaced at least a few years after OLPC was showcased and at least 7 months after the launch may at least have something about precedence determining who begot whom!

OLPC Depreciates Teachers:

Rather OLPC argues that given the fact that we cannot create all the quality teachers we need, it allows children to learn by themselves. Is that depreciating teachers? Its just that teachers help structure the knowledge and skills children acquire. But its no one's case that the children cannot learn without the teachers. However, they cannot be educated, the way we want them to, without the teachers.

Distorts Funding Choices
Whatever we have done since the WWII in the field of education pales in comparison to what OLPC offers children in terms of value. It costs way below computerization programs. It works in most challenging environments. Its designed to be rugged and for the children. And its good for most of us if we get used to the new shoes that it represents. It helps make better funding decisions. If we invest a third of what we have already invested in non-education that the 95% of developing world's children go through for $1 per week, isn't it well worth it?

My be Dweep Chanana prefers to see things through the glasses of privileges he may had access to. Coming from a most underprivileged environment I may be seeing things a little differently.

The points regarding the lack of children attending schools is a very cheap shot to a program that has the goal of yes making the traditional education model obsolete starting with teachers. But the biggest impact will come from the schools that are in big cities where conectivity is more prevalent and kids already have access to many services from the city that rural kids don't.

OLPC will elevate the level of interest on topics that before were way more boring and also investigate much more factual data. It wont save nutritionary issues, nor will they take them out of the third world, or assure them a job, or cure cancer (at least this year). But I think that blaming OLPC for kids with lack of access to schools is a bit of a stretch.

Most of the OLPC denialist most of the time don't focus on the actual immediate impact which is the quality of the information, the amount of information, the currentness of it and the level of interest of it.

I am a middle school teacher and doctoral student investigating the impact of the XOs and Sugar on a group of five 5th-grade classrooms. The biggest impact we have seen so far is that the students are developing more autonomy and ownership for the learning environment itself.

Is this solely dependent upon the XOs and Sugar? These technology devices and their software have made this type of change to the classroom learning environment possible in an incredibly effective way.

Is this a revolution? Not yet. Does it have a possibility for some real change? I think so.