The basis is however, on the OLPC homepage, they listed that the educational money allocations should be spent on the XO, instead of the other factors. They are probably biased of course.

“Given the resources that poor countries can reasonably allocate to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per pupil, compared to the approximately $7500 per pupil spent annually in the U.S.—even a doubled or redoubled national commitment to traditional education, augmented by external and private funding, would not get the job done. Moreover, experience strongly suggests that an incremental increase of “more of the same”—building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment—is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world”

Supposedly “more of the same” is insufficient. hm, I don’t know if I can agree with that. I would give you the exact link, but I gotta do a presentation in 30 min!

Say a country has a certain budget for education. How should they portion it out? Exactly how much of it should be spent on computers given their current situation (whatever that is)? I think the risk is, they might be tempted to spend too much on the hugely impressive OLPC hardware and too little on the educational infrastructure needed to make it effective.

This decision needs to be weighed up very carefully, not headed into blindly. We should be helping them with it, not just trying to sell them our kit!

Read more about this kind of stuff at http://www.olpcnews.com …

In some countries people live like in XX century in USA/EU, There are countries with XIX century standards, and OLPC try to close this gap. Of course more is needed not only this.

I’m from Poland. I got free quite good education from communist state in 80 and 90. I also made it and I’m now Software Architect in small company in UK.
But what if I will have chance to learn IT and programing not when I was 21, but when I was 14 or even 7?

Yes, not all this kids will work in IT, but if they will be doctors, or even work in tourist industry they will also need to learn ow to use computers.
If you say children in Africa don’t need to learn computers in XXI century, is like you will say to them in XX century: “You don’t need to know how to drive a car.” or “You don’t need to learn chemistry”.

Of course you can do much more in education both in US and in Africa. But this is not a reason to criticize OLPC.

You are correct, the OLPC’s are being sold all right, OLPC itself claims poverty. Most countries will have to either borrow directly for an OLPC purchase, or ask another country to donate either the laptops or the cash. Quanta, the ODM, can’t be paid in “warm & fuzzies”.

But you did get the equation wrong. Its OLPC’s + Kids + Miracle = Education. You can’t forget the miracle of “learing learning” in the absence of a dedicated teacher training program.

Mike – ASFAIK the OPLCs are being SOLD to the governments of the developing countries. They are not being given away for free. so it’s nothing to do with the west pouring money anywhere. (I think – someone please correct me if I am wrong).

That said, just because previous IT projects failed to improve education, does not mean this one will. This is far, far from giving kids a copy of Word+Excel+PowerPoint and artificially forcing them into lessons. Even if the only thing OLPC does is act as an e-book reader, it’ll still have been worth it, but it has a lot more potential than just that.

It could easily crash and burn, but we’ll have to wait and see. Let’s be optimistic, seeing as it’ll happen anyway.

NB: “pouring money into teacher training” isn’t necessarily an option. Would foreign countries want random western organisations to train their teachers? Probably not. They’d probably want the money, so we’d give it to them, and then [a] the training would not be that good and [b] it might get embezzled anyway.