From The New York Times
Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough
By Randall Stross
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD is a nonprofit group that thinks big. Since 2007, it has sold inexpensive but rugged laptop computers to the governments of less-developed countries. The goal is to equip each of the two billion children in the developing world with his or her own computer.
It’s been slow going. About 1.6 million of the group’s laptops have been distributed to date, said Matt Keller, vice president for global advocacy at the O.L.P.C. Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Today, the largest concentrations are in Uruguay, at around 400,000, and Peru, at 280,000, followed by Rwanda (110,000) and Haiti and Mongolia (15,000 each)....
Some Microsoft researchers in India have investigated how to give those same children better use of PCs that are already in place, even though one machine is shared by many. In one project, Microsoft’s programmers developed software that added multiple cursors on the screen, each controlled by a separate mouse. Software written for the paradigm allows students to compete or collaborate on multiple-choice questions. It was well received in schools, and Microsoft turned it into a free product called MultiPoint.
“We jokingly call it ‘One Mouse Per Child,’ ” said Kentaro Toyama, who led the project while he spent five years in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India.
Mr. Toyama, who received a computer-science doctorate at Yale, left Microsoft last December and is now a research fellow at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been giving talks at American universities about the “technological utopianism” that he sees in initiatives like One Laptop Per Child, Intel’s Classmate PC, and even MultiPoint. He says such initiatives rest upon a myth that “technology is the bottleneck in developing countries.”
Lots of other things are bottlenecks, too, he says — including institutional limitations, economics, the basic service infrastructure and politics. Nor is technology synonymous with education.
“Initially, we had the idea that PCs could make up for teacher absenteeism or poor training,” he said. “But studies of PCs in schools are mixed, at best. Most show that a good school with good teachers can do positive things with PCs, but that PCs don’t fix bad schools.”...