We need Visionaries!!!

 As to the OLPC News article referencing the article "Can OLPC Save the World's Poor" by Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames.
 It's a tall challenge "Save the World's Poor". Given our own common sense, we know that no single effort  will save the world's poor.   
This article seems to answer its own question of the value of the OLPC effort by Nicolas Negroponte.   Yes, he is a visionary, and visionaries have their role.  We can't make progress without their courage to proselytize and promote and an idea whose time has come.  As the authors wrote,  his vision has spurred a flurry of activity by industry to address the lowcost laptop market - hooray.  If this were the only outcome, it is signficant.  
We all seem to agree that the solutions to education are a long term investment and a critical part of eliminating poverty,  just as are deworming, paying for schools uniforms, or health care.  There should be no either/or: all are necessary.   In Africa, is that most people will purchase time on their cell phone before they feed themselves. Communication is critical.
Children in rural schools often only have access to the information written on the blackboard by teachers and copied into the thin pages of their notebooks.  Even without the internet a great deal of information is available either on a school server or USB drives.  Sugar is a child friendly graphical interface and it can be booted up from a CD on any PC.   What's best is that no one has to pay a Microsoft for updates.  Open source is critical to the future of the software "activities". 
Our experience is that once a child learns to open the XO, almost everything else happens instinctively.   Marginalized children with less support at home will always need more social support.  Mohammed Yunus advises us to start with the most needy groups if we are serious about social change. Most amazing for some children, is for the first time they are able to create something about themselves, whether it is a drawing, writing, or using the video and audio recording tools.
I often use a comparison of the cost and efforts  to ship books to schools.  Books are is impractical in most of these rural classrooms. But when there is a way to read a digital file, you can make available hundreds of books on a single USB, and distribute them to many laptops in a very short time.  There is no dust, weight, transportation costs. 
The big factor is electricity.     Industry has made such amazing progress producing smaller and smaller memory and cpus, it's incredible that better battery technology isn't currently available.  It will be soon, so  when it is available the XO will catch it.  In the meantime, creative use of solar panels and batteries, or "windmills" are in the works in all of these rural locations.
In our Small Solutions deployments,  they have made very creative use of a small number of XOs, using projectors to share information with larger groups, as well as creating groups as the XO experts.  Even serveral students using one XO actually can be successful.  These children collaborate quite well.  One evaluator cited collaboration as one of the benefits of the XO project she reviewed. 
There are a number of strategies used in the field to assist teachers unable find time to integrate the XO in their class curriculums.  Our teams have trained local unemployed teachers for this task. They teach a class directly giving the teacher a break, and opening more interest in training.
At the end of the article, the authors say that if the movement takes the lessons from the deployments and "moves away from uptopianism", then there is a worthwhile contribution to be made.   With any visionary project, that is the expected trajectory. Trial, and adjustment. 
The authors often used  emotional and hyperbolic language not in keeping with an academic article.  The arguments  jump from a "utopian" vision to claiming failure for impractial goals.  Althoughresource articles were cited, when searching an article for the point made by the author, the data seemed taken out of context and more important factors ignored. 
Remembering the first Macintosh gives me faith that this too will prevail.
 Sandra Thaxter