Mason Inman - science journalist

I wish the One Laptop Per Child project didn't get so much press, because every time my girlfriend hears about it, her head nearly explodes.

She's got a bunch of criticisms of the project, which normally aren't addressed in news stories about the project. Things like, is this the best way for poor countries to use their scant resources? If laptops are handed to poor people, what's stopping them from selling the computers, especially if they hit hard times? And, are the laptops going to be used well in schools where the teachers don't have good training on how to teach with computers?

I don't know if people weren't making these criticisms before because they hadn't thought of them, or if it's that journalists weren't covering these criticisms because it seemed too negative.

In any case, today New Scientist has one of the first articles I've read that really gives a decent amount of space to these criticisms, which was nice to see. From the article:

"On the technology I think the project is amazing and wonderful," said Wayan Vota, whose blog One Laptop per Child News monitors the project's progress. "What gives me pause is the social implications, the economic implications" of how the scheme will be implemented.

Vota is also director of Geekcorps, a non-profit organisation that promotes communication technology in developing countries, and he predicts staggering costs for some poor nations. "Essentially they want developing countries – or countries that already have a significant amount of debt or other commitments – to borrow even more, or to use even more of their limited resources, to buy the laptops and to implement them in a way that is untried and untested on a large scale," He warns.

"If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73% of the entire Nigerian budget – that's not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria," he says.

Hostile response

Some educators may also be hostile toward it because the machines are designed to encourage students to experiment with everything from music and creating videos to writing their own computer programs, says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

"You'll find some classrooms where the teachers are excited about letting the students experiment and explore but you'll also find a lot based on rote and repetition," he says.

...

Bender says the laptops can also be remotely shut down to prevent them being sold in black markets. But Vota contends that hackers will try to buy them and will easily crack their code. "For people earning one dollar a day the temptation to sell it for $300 will be very strong," he says.

It would be awesome if the whole project solved some big problems that developing countries have, but I really don't see it happening. I mean, they're talking about how the kids can trade photos, and will have music making software on their computers. Are they supposed to be trying to get recording contracts?