I have been doing a lot of reading on ICT (information and communication technologies) and education lately. What continually surprises is the disjunct between what research shows ICT in the classroom can do and what proponents claim it can do. I have found the One Laptop per Child project, which aims to distribute the MIT $100 laptop, so questionable in this respect. Here are three reasons I feel this way:

1. $100 is a lot of money. In many low-income countries educational expenditures are less than USD 20 per student per year. It is hard to justify spending 5 years of a student’s budget on a laptop. If the project reaches its goal of 100 million laptops, this will mean a total expenditure of roughly $10 billion dollars. Could this money be put to better uses?

2. Theory over evidence. The OLPC mission is based heavily on the theory of constructionism as described by Papert, Kay, and Negroponte. However, actual research on 1:1 student computing (i.e. providing each student with a laptop) really don’t show the kind of results predicted by OLPC.

3. The challenge is not inexpensive hardware. The root causes of poverty today are to be found in complex social, political, and cultural relationships on both micro and macro levels. Information access and education are the this way to address this, but these do not require large numbers of computers. In fact, my experience is that these goals are best served by programs initiated at the community level.

I do think that the $100 is an impressive and socially-conscious piece of engineering. I do like the use of open hardware and open source software. However, I really don’t like the unsubstantiated claims made in the name of education and poverty alleviation for the world’s poorest children.