Comp. One Laptop per Child. Plan Ceibal - Portal institucional del Plan Ceibal - OLPC Uruguay. Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, two years on. The Failure of One Laptop Per Child. "25 million laptops later," Mashable announced today, "One Laptop Per Child doesn't increase test scores. " "Error Message," reads the headline from The Economist: "A disappointing return from an investment in computing. " The tenor of these stories feels like a grand "Gotcha! " for ed-tech: It's shiny stuff, sure, but it offers no measurable gains in "student achievement. " So while the OLPC project might have been a good idea, so the story goes, it is not a good investment.
One Laptop Per Child was a good idea, a noble and ambitious one at that. Arguably more significant than the competition OLPC faces from these low-cost tablets and netbooks: 95% of the world's population now owns a cellphone, by some estimates (See Wikipedia's list of mobile phone penetration, broken down by country). The mission of the non-profit organization always stressed something broader, bigger -- One Laptop per Child meant empowerment, engagement, and education: Oh right. But is that failure? Photo credits: OLPC.