OLPC One laptop per child is an education project championed by Nicholas Negroponte with the aim of enhancing conventional education by using the principles of constructionism . However, the public has focussed attention on the laptop rather than the educational revolution.
How do you deliver one laptop per child? For a start you need a lot of them, together with distribution and service centres. You need to check for country dependent localisations and translations of instructions. All of this is straightforward IT rollout and you just need to hire in the skills to do it. More importantly you need to get the end users on board. The end users are the teachers and education boards - not the children. So the clear strategic vision of OLPC becomes the real life tactical project OLPTPTPC One Laptop Per Teacher Plus Training PLus Infrastructure. Like all strategic visions there is a lot to be done to turn it into reality. OLPC, like any other IT rollout, needs buy in from the users, a significant change in user processes, an enhanced communications infrastructure and enough time and money to get these right before the hardware arrives. So the cost per desk is going to be much more than the $100 cost of the laptop - just like any other IT rollout.
I hope OLPC has a parallel stream of funding over and above buying laptops to ensure that its vision can be implemented
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