[UFO Chicago] Meeting Followup: The Defamation of OLPC and Nicholas Negroponte

[Neil R. Ormos]

The Claim:

  Only a few thousand XO laptops were ever shipped.

The Reality:

  Over a million units shipped.

Source:

  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child>

==================================================

And from the department of
  "What, never?
   No, never!
   What, *never*?
   Well, hardly ever!":

The Claim:

  No school laptop program has ever been successful.
  When such programs have been tried, they have always
  failed.

The Reality:

  [...] [C]ase studies of two K-12 schools that
  successfully employ high-technology environments,
  including laptop computers for each student
  [...]. In the first school, Latino fourth-grade
  students use laptops and other new technologies
  for a wide variety of pre- and post-reading tasks
  as part of their effort to transition from
  learning to read to reading to learn. In the
  second school, diverse immigrant and refugee
  students at the middle school level combine
  technology use with Expeditionary Learning to
  carry out community projects leading to the
  development of sophisticated products. [...]

Source:

  Warschauer et al.; Promoting Academic Literacy
  with Technology: Successful Laptop Programs in
  K-12 Schools; System: An International Journal of
  Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics;
  v32 n4 p525-537 Dec 2004.

  <http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/warschauer_m/docs/promoting.pdf>