I hate One Laptop per Child. Which is to say, I'm so passionate about the idea that watching other people make choices that I disagreed with pained me greatly. I desperately wanted them to succeed, but I thought they were unintentionally poisoning the well for all future ideas in the same space.

It's a nice enough idea, to make a computing device that is rugged enough, powered by humans, and mesh networked. That's a nice idea.

But the vastly more important idea was to TEACH with computers. And I feel OLPC completely under-served that need. Putting all of their eggs in the Constructionism basket enraged me.

I'd much rather see a team take existing hardware, existing operating system, and develop an app for it that acts as much as possible like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age."

It's not the total solution, but I think it would have been far better to take Khan Academy, and cram it in a computer. A little bit like "Khan Academy on a Stick." http://mujica.org/khan/ (Translated to each language, and culturally adapted where necessary.)

I love the idea of a laptop being the cheapest possible way to give a kid a ton of books. ...but then they didn't cram a ton of books in each OLPC! Hand out enough books, and you'll get more Srinivasa Ramanujan's.

And for full disclosure, I have a Masters degree in Computer Science, but no background in education, so my opinion is just my opinion. But as a CompSci geek, the OLPC always felt to me like "Computer Nerds Save the World." Rather than "Educators cram what they know about teaching into a computer, so every child can have their own, personal, education box."