A report from the Peru OLPC deployment

What I see the OLPC as providing for education, is what the Atari-400 did for me when I was 5-10 years old back in 80-85. I was one of a very I suspect rare subset of kids that had access to that, as well as an 11 year older brother deep into that small niche at the time. But having access to logo(turtle graphics programming language), basic, and entertaining games, absolutely led me down the path of enjoying computer engineering. While I don't think that path is for everyone, by deploying these devices to all kids, the ones who like it and have a talent for it, will have genuine opportunity to hack as deep as they want, at whatever speed and rate of advancement they naturally achieve. And they _also_ happen to be useful for basic educational software, which, while not as ideal as focused adult teaching, might be better than what many parents do- park their kids in front of television and movies. And hey, they work for that too. The key I see, is providing enough of that actual focused adult interaction, such that the lesson is taught and sinks in, that one should for significant fractions of their time, also turn off the network, and computer, and learn and experience more traditional aspects of life as well. It's all balance in the end, but I do see tremendous value in every kid walking around with a 10G cache of wikipedia and some other things, for their instant perusal, as if they had parents that could afford to dedicate large rooms of their house to good libraries. BUT... if we do this in a way that micromanages and spies on kids behaviours, I think that would not be good, though perhaps inevitable. I.e. the kids finding out that at age 12, they were not told that second by second recordings of their activities were being logged in 'the journal' to be dissected by their parents, and perhaps commercial educational organizations. Sigh... I'm sure parenting must not be easy these days...