Introduction
OLPC is a relatively new project. Nicolas Negroponte first announced his idea of a low-cost laptop to be used by children at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005. Although this was the culmination of decades‟ worth of work from Negroponte, as far back as distributing microcomputers to school children in Dakar in 1982, the first XO deployment only took place in February 2007, with mass production beginning in November of that year.
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, they need people who believe in what they’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege.
The root cause of the rapid change, digital technology, also provides a solution. When every child has a connected laptop, they have in their hands the key to full development and participation. Limits are erased as they can learn to work with others around the world, to access high-quality, modern materials, to engage their passions and develop their expertise.
What children lack is not capability, it is opportunity and resources. The tool with which to unlock their potential is the XO. Put this ultra-low-cost, poweful, rugged, low-power, ecological laptop in their hands and contribute to making a better world. In the first years of OLPC They have seen two million previously marginalized children learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities. They are working to provide this opportunity to millions more.
Currently over 1 million XOs have been deployed through OLPC projects in over 40 countries. Current XO deployment projects vary in almost every respect, including how they are set up, funded, managed, implemented, and supported. All projects involve a number of entities, ranging from international donor agencies, national ministries or local departments of education and ICT companies, to Non-Government Organizations or private non-profit foundations.

About the Project
The mission is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowred learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.
They aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, they have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowerd learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. They believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for learning.
XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.
Extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and most remote populations on earth, constructionism emphasizes what Papert calls “learning learning” as the fundamental educational experience. A computer uniquely fosters learning learning by allowing children to “think about thinking”, in ways that are otherwise impossible. Using the XO as both their window on the world, as they will as a highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential.
OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.
The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonwealth, because it lacks the tools to do so.

Countries Covered

2 million children and teachers in Latin America are currently part of an OLPC project, with another 500,000 in Africa and the rest of the world. Our largest national partners include Uruguay (the first major country in the world to provide every elementary school child with a laptop), Peru (our largest deployment, involving over 8,300 schools), Argentina, Mexico, and Rwanda. Other significant projects have been started in Gaza, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Mongolia. Every school represents a learning hub, a node in a globally shared resource for learning.

Laptops have been delivered to the following countries, either following an order or as part of the Give One Get One program: * Africa and Middle East * Ethiopia (5,000 laptops received from G1G1 program) * Gaza (2,100 laptops received) * Ghana (10,000 laptops ordered) * Rwanda (20,000 laptops received from G1G1 program, 100,000 laptops ordered) * Sierra Leone (5,000 laptops ordered) * North America * Canada (5,000 laptops ordered for First Nations communities) * Mexico (50,000 laptops ordered by businessman Carlos Slim) * United States of America (15,000 laptops for Birmingham, Alabama; 1,500 for Chester, Pennsylvania) * Caribbean and Latin America * Argentina (60,000 laptops ordered) * Colombia (20,000 laptops ordered) * Haiti (13,000 laptops received from G1G1 program) * Peru (870,000 laptops ordered, most recently in December 2010) * Uruguay (380,000+ given to 1-6 students and teachers, completing the initial objective. 90,000 ordered in 2010 for high-school students). * Asia * Afghanistan (11,000 laptops received from G1G1 program) * Cambodia (3,200 laptops received from G1G1 program) * India (5,000 laptops including for the Government of Manipur) * Mongolia (10,000 laptops received from G1G1 program) Oceania * Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu (5,000 laptops received from G1G1 program) * Australia (5,000 laptops ordered by the independent non-profit OLPC Australia)

Reality of the Project

Although some developing countries are indeed deploying OLPC laptops, others have cancelled planned deployments or are waiting on the results of pilot projects before deciding whether to acquire them in numbers. Meanwhile, the OLPC organization struggles with key staff defections, budget cuts, and ideological disillusionment, as it appears to some that the educational mission has given way to just getting laptops out the door. In addition, low cost commercial netbooks from Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and other PC vendors have been launched with great early success. So rather than distributing millions of laptops to poor children itself, OLPC has motivated the PC industry to develop lower-cost, education-oriented PCs, providing developing countries with low-cost computing options directly in competition with OLPC ’s own innovation.
In that sense, OLPC’s apparent failure may be a step toward broader success in providing a new tool for children in developing countries. However, it is also clear that the PC industry cannot profitably reach millions of the poorest children, so the OLPC objectives might never be achieved through the commercial market alone.

At the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the idea of one laptop per child (OLPC), a $100 pc that would transform education for the world’s disadvantaged schoolchildren by giving them the means to teach themselves and each other. he estimated that up to 150 million of these laptops could be shipped annually by the end of 2007.4 with $20 million in startup investment, sponsorships and partnerships with major it industry players, and interest from developing countries, the nonprofit OLPC project generated excitement among international leaders and the world media. Yet as of June 2009 only a few
Hundred thousand laptops have been distributed (they were first available in 2007), and OLPC has been forced to dramatically scale back its ambitions.

The case of OLPC can be seen as a study in the general diffusion of innovation in developing countries. Our analysis draws on diffusion-of-innovation theory, exemplified by Rogers, 18 and illustrates the difficulty in getting widespread adoption of even proven
Innovation due to misunderstanding the social and cultural environment
In which the innovation is to be introduced. They also bring to bear specific
Insights from the literature on adoption of IT in developing countries, 2, 25 using them to analyze the OLPC experience and draw implications for developers and policymakers.
The original OLPC vision was to change education through the development and distribution of low-cost laptops embodying a new learning model to every child in the developing countries. Despite shifting over time, it can be characterized by the following text from the OLPC charter: “OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a nonprofit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community” a former director of MIT’s Media Lab, OLPC aimed to achieve its vision through extraordinary innovation in hardware and software that fosters self-learning and fits with the often-harsh environment in developing countries.

Constrains

The critique began with Negroponte and OLPC’s stated mission to “to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning.” They questioned the project’s guiding assumption that “more laptop/children = more progress”; they also questioned the assumptions of the project that infrastructure & educational systems would be comparable everywhere, all at once. Mostly, they questioned the tragically common view known as technological determinism — that a given technology will lead to the same outcome, no matter where it is introduced, how it is introduced, or when. The outcomes, on this impoverished view of the relationship between technology and society, are predetermined by the physical technology. (This view also assumes that what one means by “technology” is only the physical hunk of material sitting there, as opposed to including its constitutive organizational, values, and knowledge elements.) In the case of OLPC, the project assumes equal global cultural values & regional attributes. It also assumes common introduction, maintenance, educational (as in learning styles and habits), and image values everywhere in the world. Furthermore, it lives in a historical vacuum assuming that there is no history in the so-called “developing world” for shiny, fancy things from the west dropped in, The-Gods-Must-Be-Crazy style, from the sky.

To illustrate the growing interest in one to one computing approaches, in February 2010, an international conference on the topic was held in Vienna, supported by the Austrian Ministry of Education, the World Bank, IADB and OECD7. The conference, believed to be the first of its kind, brought together speakers from funding and implementing agencies, governments and private foundations that have been involved in one to one computing initiatives to share their experience and network with one another. Various OLPC foundations and others who have been involved in OLPC funding and deployments took part in the conference.
Of the seven panel sessions, three were dedicated to monitoring and evaluation issues: one discussed how to monitor the use and results of one to one initiatives, one discussed their impact on students‟ outcomes and another discussed their impact on equity and bridging the digital divide.

Findings

In most of the countries reviewed, the OLPC projects are still in their early days. Many are at the end of their pilot project implementation phase and preparing for wider deployment, while some are still establishing pilot projects. There are exceptions, however. The Pacific Island country of Niue is aiming to be the first country in the world with full saturation of XOs in its schools. Within some countries the OLPC program received strong support from regional governments, with large-scale or full deployments in particular regions. Birmingham in the state of Alabama in the United States committed to deployment of XOs in all of its schools as early as 2007.
In 2006, the IADB signed a formal agreement with OLPC to “support the development and mainstreaming of 1 to 1 computing in Latin American and Caribbean schools”.6 The IADB has so far supported OLPC deployments in Haiti, Paraguay, Brazil and Uruguay. Latin American countries and Caribbean countries have therefore become the most enthusiastic adopters of the OLPC and other one-to-one computing projects, with several countries having already completed a full round of pilot projects and having starting to implement their country-wide large-scale one-to-one computing projects.
Brazil, the first country to receive XO laptops under the OLPC program, began trials for its Um Computador por Alun (One Computer per Child) / UCA program in early 2007 with five schools. Two of the schools received XOs, two received Intel Classmate laptops and one school received Mobiles laptops. In January 2009, following a public bid the Brazilian government announced that it would be purchasing Mobilis laptops for a wider implementation of UCA involving 300 schools. After it was further found that the laptop did not meet the government’s minimum specifications, the government went with the second place bidder, which was a local assembler of Classmate laptops.
Conversely, Uruguay became the first country to make a government bulk order for XOs when it purchased 10,000 laptops in October 2007 under its Plan Ceibal. This followed a public bidding process that also involved Classmate PC.

Recommendation

In 2008 they travelled for 6 months; from the end of May till the end of November 2008. On our trip through Russia, Mongolia, Nepal and India they decided to visit a number of OLPC projects in Asia. In Russia there were none. In cooperation with Russian volunteers they started the first project in Russia. In the Netherlands they raised funds through our Foundation “Making Miles for Millennium” to realize the project in Russia and to support the deployments in the other countries. In this document they report our experiences of working with OLPC. Our aim is to write an objective report of what they have experienced. It is not an evaluation of our performance as it relates to the OLPC projects and it is not about the various projects they have visited. The current deployments are all still in a very embryonic stage and it is too early yet to evaluate these. The evaluation is all about our experiences with the organization OLPC. To be honest they have never been in Boston. It is based on internet, the email/chat/phone conversations and occasionally live contacts they have had with the OLPC staff. It will be a story about what they have seen and experienced from the outside. Our hope is that this evaluation will help OLPC to work towards its mission. To structure our experiences they followed roughly the whole business process starting at what the primary focus is of OLPC, the price, the ordering, the delivery and the support.

Beside this, the most essential change is that it becomes more humane, and not more technological. On the contrary, introducing more technology into education turns it more inhumane. Machines are, from a certain point of view, sub natural – compare, for instance, the richness of the million-year history of a pebble, or of a crystal, with any machine, as complex it can be. It is symptomatic that Waldorf Education, with its strong emphasis on humanistic and artistic education (besides its strong scientific education, mainly in high school), which tries to treat students with the highest love, humanity and respect (see, for instance, how a class teacher shakes hands with every student at the beginning of a class day, from grade 1 on), is such that no real Waldorf school use computers before high school. They are used for teaching what they are and how they may be employed in useful ways, for instance for students obtaining through the Internet material for their special high school graduation work (in general involving a theoretical as well as a practical side). I strongly recommend readers to visit a Waldorf school to see all this with their own eyes. In particular, anyone that visits a Waldorf kindergarten anywhere in the world feels such an involving and tender atmosphere that he will have desires of becoming a child again.

Solution

It is very important and urgent to recognize that the environmental problems we are suffering now are a consequence of the way technology is cherished and admired, and its use for the sake of egotism and greed. A typical technological way of seeing the future is Bill Gates’ book. It seems to me that this worship of technology is the fundamental reason behind the OLPC, already mentioned in section 2: the more technology in education, the better. The improvement, and probably survival of humanity goes necessarily through a change in the view of the world. Machines have to be put in their right place, and we should free ourselves from the slavery we have made them impinge upon us. A break should be put in the will, emotional and mental disasters caused by the use of computers by children and adolescents; but for this we must develop a consciousness of the problems they cause.
We are now conscious of the terrible destruction of nature presently going on. In my opinion, its surreptitious intention is the destruction of humanity, and it is obvious that some direct attacks to the latter were going to occur. There is nothing more efficient along this line than to attack children and adolescents through TV, video games, computers and the Internet, impairing their harmonic and healthy development. This way, anti-social adults will be developed, without compassion and creativity, passive, with fixed ideas and fanaticism. We are already encountering more and more people of this kind.

Conclusion

Several conclusions can be drawn from the review of evaluations carried out on OLPC projects around the world. The most obvious one is that because most of the deployment projects have only started recently, there has been little time to conduct any longitudinal assessments of its impact. Because of this as well, little formal documentation currently exists on evaluations of recent projects and the ones that do exist vary greatly.

The freedom presented by computers reaches a high point in the use of the Internet. Here the user has a full virtual world at his disposal, and an enormous power of discernment and self-control has to be exercised, in order not to be attracted by sites he is not looking for, or which are improper for his maturity. It is also necessary to have a high degree of self-consciousness and self-control to stop using the Internet, because the material available through it is in general made to attract the user. The question of improper sites for children and adolescents do not have to do just with pornography or involving pedophilia, which immediately come to mind. Some decent subject, like global warming, may produce undesired effects upon children who cannot really understand what it means. The newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, already cited in section 3.2 above, brings in its edition of April 4, 2007, p. A24, an article titled "Environment deprives children of their sleep", where it is told about the "tremendous effect that the news on global warming is having upon children, which live with the fear of its consequences." What the article does not say is precisely the enormous influence that communication media, mainly TV, maybe also the Internet, is having over children and adolescents, particularly on this subject.

The evaluations are affected by variations in project implementation models. A more informal approach, often using the OLPC wiki, is preferred by deployments run by local foundations or organizations, often along with representatives from the OLPC team, whereas projects that involve international entities – either multilateral agency such as the IADB or individual organizations based in countries other than the deployment country – favor more formal evaluation mechanisms.
The results of existing evaluations tend to be positive, highlighting educational and attitudinal impacts on students, effects on teacher-student relations, and impact on the wider community. Recommendations arising from these evaluations often relate to preparatory and ongoing training needs as well as technical matters, such as charging and network support.
Methodological issues highlighted in the review include the need to build evaluation into the planning and design stage of the program, and to ensure that the evaluation is conducted in culturally appropriate ways. Data collection also needs to take account the availability of teachers and parents in planning the timing and types of evaluation activities to be done. The need for longitudinal studies to measure impact on educational achievement is a recurring theme in both OLPC evaluations specifically and evaluations of ICT in education programs in general.