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Link for those interested: http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.

It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
    http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."

People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.

Another related essay:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."

Have you heard of the "Hole in the wall" experiment and what it has to say about functional literacy?

What once took advanced degrees and was limited to the realm of engineers quickly becomes childsplay - that is simply a natural progression. The obverse to this is that a child in 2020 will most likely be able to do more with a computer than you can today with all your old-fashioned book-learnin'.

Unfortunately, most third world kids don't speak the main language of the net

Obviously, you sprang as a fully-formed, English-speaking adult out of Zeus's forehead or something. Or not. No, instead you're just a dumbass who doesn't realize that children can learn, and moreover that the entire point of the OLPC project is learning, and that contrary to what you might think the children are most likely capable of learning English along with everything else!

Tell you what, read this: India: Hole-in-the-Wall. Then try telling me language is a real barrier!

You jest, but actually there is good reason to suspect kids in developing countries with no real techno-experience and no training provided will happily get to grips with computers. It's anecdotal I know, but it's a very interesting article, I'd recommend reading it.

Children are not born with an instictive knowledge of how to use comptuers, the internet, or English, all of which are items which are pretty much requistes of being able to find a use for these outside of making a few bucks on the black market.

I guess I have to link to this again...

I feel Mark Shuttleworth's heart is in the right place, and much good will come out of various initiatives he is involved in, but I'm thinking specifically of this project of his:
    "The SchoolTool Project"
    http://www.schooltool.org/
From there: "SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license. SchoolTool encompasses three sub-projects:
        * SchoolTool Calendar and SchoolBell are calendar and resource management tools for schools available as part of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.
        * A SchoolTool student information system is being developed and tested in collaboration with schools in Lithuania and Belgium during the 2006 - 2007 school year
        * CanDo is a SchoolTool-based skills tracking program developed by Virginia students and teachers to track which skills students are acquiring in their classes and at what level of competency."

So that software is definitely intended to be applicable in the USA.

I think the "Hole in the Wall" approach pioneered by Sugata Mitra has a lot to recommend itself as an approach to help kids in poor areas. From:
        http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm
"Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education." ...
To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree. ...
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him."

Also of great potential for learning is the "Fab Lab" idea:
    http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/
From there: "Fab Labs are the educational outreach component for the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... By making accessible engineering in space (down to microns, through precision machining) and time (down to microseconds, through RISC microcontrollers), these facilities have been uncovering what can be thought of as instrumentation and fabrication divides, and suggesting that they can be addressed by bringing IT development rather than just IT to the masses. ... CBA Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute."

From this essay I wrote:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
    "To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite
end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand",
for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or
the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools
to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ...

And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative
work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and
creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based
ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as
opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making
things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much
sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if
you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a
challenging task) is its own reward.

But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a
way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by
automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the
drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything
you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
  one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn
something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50
contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap
themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so
of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

The "fine article" (every article on the site is one swipe at OLPC or another) basically assumes a bunch of wrongheaded things:

1) The laptops are worthless without Internet access. (they're not)

2) Internet access will cost $135/year (the OLPC project is already investigating ways to drive this waaaaaay down, and they have a deal in place to provide many of the target children with $1/year access (which the "fine article" assumes will fall apart).

3) Without training, the laptops are worthless (NOT). Training will be hugely expensive (I find his reasoning suspect). Training costs will recur every year. (WTF?)

4) Five laptops will need full replacements every year. While that may be true, the justification ignores all the effort the OLPC people have put into making these things user-servicable, and hardening them against heat and dust.

#2 is the biggie, since it provides the bulk of the TCO figure. It's also incredibly suspicious, since it both assumes that the current Internet arrangements will fall apart, and that everyone will have to fall back on the worst-case scenario of $135/year. It fails to recognize that costs will be far lower in some areas.

Look, think about this for a minute: assuming you got a computer as a kid, did you need training to figure out how it worked? I know I sure didn't! And these kids won't either, even if they've never seen a computer before, and even if they don't speak English. This experiment proves it.

You know, I'm going to have to start linking this article in every OLPC thread, just to shut people making arguments like yours up.

...it really ignores the fact that basic education and literacy - a prerequiste[sic] for computer use...

This is false! Basic education and literacy are not prerequisites for computer; on the contrary, computer use is a good tool to achieve basic education and literacy! Just take a look at this experiment -- the guy put a computer in an alley and just left it there with no instruction whatsoever and the ghetto kids taught themselves how to use it!

Furthermore, he suggests that giving computers to schools all over India -- and teaching the teachers to stay out of the students' way (which is the primary problem with computers in the classroom here in the US) -- would be a great idea, but he thinks 100,000 computers could teach 500,000 kids and would cost $2 billion. This was before the OLPC project; with the $150 laptop that cost could be cut by an order of magnitude.

Sometimes the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

I don't know anything more: the story sounds half-apocryphal to me, and I apologise for its vagueness

It's, not apocryphal .

From the article: "They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass - shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something."

... about third world countries needing food and medicine more (god I can't stand those comments!), here's a very nice article I found through reddit about what happened when an Indian computer chap put a comp in a slum in the capital city.
Its 6 years old but sure makes for nice reading. Stuff like that makes the OLPC worth it IMO.

Wow, more social-experiment than a tech one but wow.
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

They will figure it out. And yes, the plan is to have these things on the internet.

Without learning how to read, or operate the machine the machine is useless.

Take a look at this. Your assumption is wrong, children are smarter than you think.
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

Web-Surfing Indian Slum Kids Ask: "What's a Computer"

Hole in the Wall Story

Hole in the Wall Website

If you're really serious about this, try this hole in the wall

You might want to configure a wiki to give people a persistent platform on which to post their views and organize their information.

phpwiki can even organize wiki pages into community calendars.

Go for it!

I run my own community wiki as my part for defeating the bandwidth whores and content killing IP pimps at their own game.

..the image of a huge wall that separates a handful of elite technologists from people who live in such abject poverty and squalor that they use this vacant lot as an open-air toilet is incredibly disturbing.

But elite technologists in the west and poverty in the Third world isn't disturbing? Get real, didn't you know there was poverty before you read this? Why is it worse for people in third world countries to be (relatively) wealthy?

instead of sticking Web terminals into walls to see how the local troglodyte children react to it while standing ankle-deep in human waste.

I think you have completely missed the point of what he did and why he did it Try reading the Greenstar Article. Describing these children as troglodyte (literal meaning 'cave dweller' so inaccurate ) is more offensive than anything about this project.

Like with photoshop? Or with a can of spray paint?

Closer to the former. Read the article: "And they would use [Microsoft] Paint. It's very, very popular with all of them."

fav Yunus quote:

Poverty is not created by the poor people. Poverty is created by the institutions that we have built around us. We have to go back to the drawing board, to redesign those institutions, so that they do not discriminate the poor, because the present ones do.

http://www.grameen.com/mcredit/weapon.ht ml

The war against poverty, in the long run, may prove to be the most profitable business on the 'net and planet.. it will obviously expand the marketplace for trading and sharing ideas..

re: infrastructure.. um.. in China, even with low annual incomes, cel phone usage ka-booms. Users pay by listening to ads. Sound familiar? Extrapolate this, along with Gilder's, Moore's, and Metcalfe's Laws.. Billions will have full access in a decade, almost for free. Since the 'net is a global medium and evolving jurisdiction, it will transform all goverments faster than we think.

Free software is sharing an increasing wealth of knowledge (power) without discrimation against the poor.. this is a radical shift away from centralized control and domination by force and money-as-we-know-it.. and watch out for freenet:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net
http://wired.com/news/print/0,1294,34768,00.html">

also, re infrastructure, check out:
http://www.media.mit.edu/unwired/more/ and
http://www.greenstar.org

(off topic and unrepentant) - anyone know of a place to rent "solar-powered web-server space"? (Y2K ready!8P) I'd pay a premium to get off the grid. It'd also buy post-industrial bragging rights. Reputation Management! We're talkin' about an exciting business opportunity here:)

Greenstar is uber cool, but not quite for right this. KTAO broadcasts a solar-powered 50,000 watt radio signal from atop a New Mexico mountain, but no backbone connect:/.. I'd try it w/ my DSL at home, but my landlord won't have it:\.. any leads?