I live in Argentina. The OLPC came to Argentina to promote the project, at the same time as Uruguay our neighbors. The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no adopt it was incredible.
In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks.
I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics (e.g. the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in Latin America the education system). While technology is an important driver for change, if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough. Sadly companies like Microsoft and Intel understood that it was easy to convince corrupt politicians to buy the machines without a substantial change of the status quo: win-win for the companies and policy makers, but a loss for the future of children.
In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks.
I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics (e.g. the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in Latin America the education system). While technology is an important driver for change, if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough. Sadly companies like Microsoft and Intel understood that it was easy to convince corrupt politicians to buy the machines without a substantial change of the status quo: win-win for the companies and policy makers, but a loss for the future of children.