Title: One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality
Authors: Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick, Prakul Sharma
Pages: 8 pp.
ISSN: 0001-0782
Doi: doi:10.1145/1516046.1516063
Source: Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Issue 6 (June 2009), Pages 66-73
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
Date published: June 2009
Date accessed: 21/06/2009
Type of information: research article
Language: English
On-line access: yes
Abstract:
The vision is being overwhelmed by the reality of business, politics, logistics, and competing interests worldwide.

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.