Thanks to the Economist for highlighting Education in Uruguay ~ Laptops for All... "Nearly all of Uruguay’s 380,000 primary-school pupils have now received a simple and cheap XO laptop, a model developed by One Laptop Per Child, an NGO based in Massachusetts. The government hopes this will help poorer and disadvantaged children do better in school while also improving the overall standard of education. These ambitions will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects. The rest of the world should be intrigued: the first country in Latin America to provide free, compulsory schooling will become the first, globally, to find out whether furnishing a whole generation with laptops is a worthwhile investment."Certainly there are challenges, as the article goes on to note, but it's excellent to see this effort be tried at scale. And XO's are being deployed in several countries. Thanks to Dutch videojournalist Ruud Elmendorp for spotlighting Small Machine, Big Mission: The XO laptop exciting children in Kibwezi, rural Kenya...
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