“Researchers examine the educational and social effects of making one laptop per child available in selected classrooms, and the impact on student outcomes.”

(Apologies if this has already been posted here somewhere, I could not find it).

We are located in Canada, 70 miiles east of Montreal and yes, the project did require a major investment but we had no government support and put our operations into a deficit as a result. Nobody would support a "rogue" School Board that invested millions into children and teachers. We found monies, via Bank loans and the work of a Foundation and no cuts or compressions were imposed upon the schools.

Please note that I use the word "investment" since in the last couple of decades, education has moved away from being an "investment" to an "expense." The use of these two words creates some very interesting reactions from people and over the past years, those who have criticized our initiative always use the word "expense" while those who appreciate the vision/mission/results of our initiative integrate the word "invest" in their commentary.

I have had multiple conversations with ambassadors from many developing countries, on how the use of technology can create such a paradigm shift in education. They too remark that the challenges inherently implicated in such an endeavour are formidable and not always obvious. But I found that in many cases, the word "invest" came up and not expense.

I have had, I believe, almost every reason given to me as to why technology has no place in the classroom, or rather, how it should be stifled and used as a tertiary teaching tool. Issues of financing and results abound.

What I do know for sure is that the "Human Factor" (not a machine, software, operating platform, internet access, battery power, cabling, electricity, etc) will be the singular most important factor and challenge that the OLPC or any initiative that integrates technology into a classroom will face. I have also seen how our own educators and students provided insights into problem solving issues that many an "expert" could not resolve.

In my humble opinion, a significant derivative of the OLPC was the return of the words "investment in education-children and teachers" to the forefront of our discussions. As previously stated, the challenges are daunting for the OLPC in any country but then again, I strongly belief that with vision and courage, all of us can make this a reality for children around the world. Now it is "Win" situation for all of us.

Very much appreciated your commentary and that of the others.

However, you are in Canada, right? Surely you are not achieving these results without a very significant increase in expenditure per pupil? How much is that in dollars and percentage?

Is that feasible for scaling up in a country where the annual expenditure per pupil is a quarter of the purchase price of the XO (not to mention total cost of ownership, TCO)? As a way of developing centres of excellence, ICTs undoubtedly have an important role to play. But that is not what the XO is purportedly aiming at. When one is looking system-wide, one has to take off the rose-tinted glasses and look at the hard realities of finance, organization, human resource development, absorbtion and implementation capacity.

Your main point about existing pedagogy is compelling, and I agree. My point is that in poor countries experimentation is great on a small scale, to test all the variables that make that experimentation successful, or moderately successful. Large-scale implementation of reform when one has a handle only on the validity of one or two elements of the proposed change (in this case the hardware) often does result in everyone being poorer and worse off than before.