IN Focus June 5, 2008, 5:00PM EST

One Laptop Meets Big Business

(page 4 of 4)

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Three students, photographed in Luquia, Peru with their brand new, child-size XO laptop computers Jeffery Salter/Redux

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Former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, photographed at OLPC’s offices in Cambridge, Mass. Dana Smith

Teachers at another school where the laptops were tested in a pilot project that began a year ago report their students' reading comprehension has improved significantly, the drop-out rate is down, and students who once said they expected to be farmers like their parents are now dreaming of becoming lawyers, accountants, or engineers.

Even with these results, the Unified Union of Education Workers of Peru, representing some 320,000 public school teachers, is skeptical. "These laptops aren't part of a comprehensive educational, pedagogical project, and their usefulness is debatable," says Luís Muñoz Alvarado, the union's general secretary. Muñoz never had a chance to explore the laptops, though. In what seems an easily avoidable blunder, the Education Ministry has not explained the program to the union.

Recognizing the need to integrate the laptops into communities, OLPC is scrambling to develop guidelines for deployment based on the experiences in Uruguay and Peru, the two countries with the largest distribution so far. The group is also bringing in consultants to advise countries on how to integrate the PCs. One, Edith Ackermann, a visiting scientist at MIT, says OLPC should have involved more educational experts in creating and testing the applications. Instead, she says, "The hackers took over." The result is some programs are too complex for many children to use. "Now we have to deal with this. I don't know if it's too late," says Ackermann.

While some critics have called on OLPC to hire aggressively so it can provide on-the-ground support for dozens of countries at a time, Negroponte and Kane plan instead to rely even more on outsiders. They'll forge alliances with local tech companies and nongovernment organizations that will provide deployment support.

Although each country has a different situation, they can learn from common experiences. OLPC plans on using Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, to test ideas about how to best integrate the computers with society and to create a template for other countries.

Just getting started in Haiti will be a challenge. The group's second trip there was delayed by riots over food shortages in April. The first shipment of laptops was held up in customs for weeks. Donors are paying for some laptops, but not all. Asked how Haiti can afford to pay for PCs when its citizens are starving, Guy Serge Pompi, the Haitian educator coordinating the project, answers: "You can't just focus on the present. The starving is the present. The future is education. We need to train our students for better jobs and a better future."

The desire to educate students for a better future was shared by officials from Rwanda, Colombia, Afghanistan, Senegal, and other countries. Although large-scale studies have not been done to show whether the laptops improve learning, initial successes in Uruguay and Peru have emboldened others to make the effort. In Peru itself, the laptops are gaining momentum. Regional governors have asked the Education Ministry to order a total of more than 500,000 additional laptops. "We aren't so overly optimistic to believe that distributing laptops is going to resolve the social demands of people who have been marginalized and submerged in extreme poverty for decades, but we believe it is a great step forward," says Education Minister José Antonio Chang.

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