Peru has its 700,000 laptops deployed across much of the country. As of 2007, the Peruvian government made a conscious decision to focus at first on the country’s most rural poor in the parts of the country that are hardest to reach and that have the least access to paved roads, electricity, and Internet access.
Independent studies of the Peruvian OLPC program have been less than stellar.
“In the classes that were observed during the qualitative evaluation, it was noted that laptops were being regularly used between two or three times a week and daily, but in most cases their use has not substantially changed the practices,” wrote the authors of a 2010 Inter-American Development Bank paper. “Additionally, it can be observed that there is a tendency for students to transcribe texts from notebooks or chalkboards to their laptops in order to edit them later.”
The paper added that “only 10.5 percent of the teachers reported having received technical support, and 7.0 percent reported having received pedagogical support for the implementation of the program at their schools.”
Other researchers have found the presence of OLPC to be disruptive in a classroom environment.
Morgan Ames, a doctoral student at Stanford University who is studying the impact of OLPC in Paraguay, said that classes with XO laptops often have to spend 30 minutes simply to get as many students as possible set up. That’s because half of the students might not bring their laptop, or might say that theirs was broken, or might have some other excuse—and would then need to borrow one from a classmate or a relative in the same school.
“When you only have three hours of instruction a day, that’s a fairly large chunk of your day just starting up,” Ames said, adding that kids often run out of batteries during the lesson and that the chargers were one of the first XO pieces to break. The result: chains of chargers going round the room, often being swapped between machines.
“A lot of teachers said they would love to use the laptop, but said that it was so costly in terms of time that they would only get through half the material that they would otherwise,” she noted.
Ames also said that based on her field study, the laptops were not nearly as rugged as Nicholas Negroponte makes them out to be. As a demonstration, he has often thrown his laptop across a conference stage—but given that many students are hitting them against tiled floors or concrete play areas, particularly when the screen is exposed, this is hardly a good test. In this case, as in many others, the gulf between what sounds good on a PowerPoint slide in front of a Western audience and how the XO laptops are actually used in the developing world remains huge.
But what happens when “one-to-one” laptop programs make their way to a place like Maine?
