The recent dispute between OLPC and Intel over Intel’s involvement with the XO laptop has again brought the issues of the OLPC project much attention.
Looking at the many articles that have been written about the recent split, there seem to be several points which should be considered, many of which have not been clarified by [...]

“In 2006 Nigeria’s government ordered one million XO laptops, becoming the first in the world to make such a large order, but since then Nigeria has had an election and the new government in power says it is reassessing the deal”, IRIN reports. Today, the One Laptop per Child scheme appears to have hit [...]

XO, also referred to as the ‘$100 laptop’, is developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative in the US, which aims not to provide computer literacy, but to improve education. However, has there been any evidence with development in emerging market countries, where jumping ahead past the immediate issues and attempting to solve them by other solutions has ever been proved to work?

Learning About Living: Nigerian students enrolled in the new eLearning program. Photo credit: African News

At the moment, Africa may be the ideal spot to “test” innovative ideas and novel concepts, however, it’s getting to a point where we would need to know what works and don’t; we would need this information in order to move forward rather than being in a state of perpetual innovation. In the face of limited resources and competing interests, who would rather prefer esoteric untested gambles over the use of tested, proven and sustainable evidence-based interventions?

Submitted by Beauty.
People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. Awesome thinking for the [...]