"Again, a quoted problem is teacher training concerns. Peru did an intensive program in the pilot programme where teachers were given one-on-three training by the deployment team. Uruguay AFAIK just handed the laptops out. …"

http://www.olpcnews.com/implementation/plan/olpc_education_project_learn...

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has been in the news a lot in recent months. Reports last fall that Uruguay purchased 100,000 XO laptops and soon US consumers could do the same via a special campaign soon gave way to news items about a patent lawsuit and Intel's abrupt departure from OLPC's board.

ITWire has a rant disguised as an opinion piece titled OLPC: one bad idea per child by Sam Varghese.

I should let it be known I have written on the OLPC XO before. All of my articles have showered it with praise. My kid wants one, I wouldn't mind tinkering a bit with it myself. So it should come as no surprise how I feel about Sam's article. Although no real point was made, I will do my best to address his comments.

There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

"India is the latest of the countries where the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experiment has started. Children from the village of Khairat were given the opportunity to learn how to use the XO laptop. During the last year XO was distributed to children from Arahuay in Peru, Ban Samkha in Thailand, Cardal in Uruguay and Galadima in Nigeria.

Dana Blankenhorn yesterday called the OLPC project a failure for its inability to mass market a low-cost Linux laptop. Dana’s definition of failure, in this case, seems to be based on the quantity of XO laptops distributed.

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows. "We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal

as things have worked out, OLPC has already made an entry into India in the form of a pilot project in a rural primary school in a village in the state of Maharasthra.

This weekend, the One Laptop per Child movement in New York City is holding an OLPC "Grassroots Jam" at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The Jam is a gathering of volunteer educators, content creators, artists, writers, programmers, engineers, and others who want to help create a central server for NYC schools that already make use of OLPC laptops.