Long article mightn't be worth reading [LWN.net]

Long article mightn't be worth reading

Posted Apr 9, 2012 10:51 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: A report from the Peru OLPC deployment by codewiz
Parent article: A report from the Peru OLPC deployment

The linked article about the problems in Peru is long and the intro uses baseless arguments like "Peru is very different to Uruguay because Peru has two official languages instead of one".

This seems unlikely to be a cause of OLPC problems, and a quick search of the article indicates that there is no further information about why this difference could be important.

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Long article mightn't be worth reading

Posted Apr 11, 2012 9:10 UTC (Wed) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

> The linked article about the problems in Peru is long and the intro uses baseless arguments like "Peru is very different to Uruguay because Peru has two official languages instead of one".

Baseless arguments?

Your post indicates that reading comprehension problems are not a privilege of Peruvian school children :-/

> This seems unlikely to be a cause of OLPC problems, and a quick search of the article indicates that there is no further information about why this difference could be important.

The linked article seems to be spot on on the realities of both countries. How about trying to _read_ the *f*unny introduction of it with a bare minimum of attention instead of "searching" it?

quote: "Uruguay’s 400,000 XOs result in full saturation of the country’s public primary school system whereas Peru’s 300,000 only cover a small double-digit percentage of its primary school pupils.""

Take home message, Uruguay is rich enough to buy a laptop to every single student in the country. Peru barely so.

quote: "Last but not least Peru’s geography – being roughly seven times larger than Uruguay and consisting of the desert coast, high Andes mountain ranges, and inaccessible jungle – and the associated difficulties of building and maintaining infrastructure such as roads, an electricity grid or Internet connectivity also present additional challenges to a project such as Una laptop por niño.
""

Take home message, Peru is a country with massive regional differences. Uruguay is (relative to Peru) flat and fully homogeneous. If you read the whole thing, the author does a good job at describing how the local Peruvian reality caused all sorts of problems.

[...]

FYI,

Peru has a desert-like coastal area, a mountaineering area and a rain forest region. General integration (transportation, services, telecommunications etc) is a lot worse in the mountain and rain forest areas (You surprised?). (Which is where most Quechua speakers live, hence the language cue.) So this is a country with great regional differences in terms of development.

Uruguay is (relative to Peru) flat flat flat, and much more homogeneous in terms of access to education, transport, telecommunications, services etc. Also, relative to Peru, Uruguay is economically stable and a fairly wealthy country.

From all the linked texts, I gather that the laptops were given to specially (i) poor (ii) isolated communities in Peru. This is a very different sample of children than the average school kid in Uruguay.