School laptop initiative yields mixed results

digital technology in the fight against poverty, MSNBC says.

Yet, five years in, there are serious doubts about whether the largest single deployment in the One Laptop Per Child initiative, inspired by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, was worth the more than $200 million that Peru's government spent.

Ill-prepared rural teachers were often unable to fathom, much less teach with the machines, software bugs didn't get fixed, and most had no way to connect to the Internet, CourierPostOnline.com reports.

Many could not take the computers home as the initiative intended. And some schools even lacked electricity to keep them running.

“In essence, what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers,” said Sandro Marcone, the Peruvian education official who now runs the programme.

He believes the missteps may have actually widened the gap between children able to benefit from the computers and those ill-equipped to do so, he says, in a country whose public education system is rated among the world's most deficient, USA Today writes.

The volume of "education" computers delivered globally remains modest. Intel says it has shipped more than seven million, about a third in Argentina. Venezuela boasts 1.6 million distributed, licensed by a Portuguese company.