Published Version
Excerpt
“When I first heard about the One Laptop per Child [OLPC] programme—the goal of distributing inexpensively produced laptops to every child in the world for education—my immediate reaction was: what a great idea! When faced with OLPC’s cute, little XO laptops, the problem of ‘The Digital Divide’ seems so simple and so solvable
“But that was my first alarm bell: simple. It seemed so simple. Solutions can often be simple—but development problems are rarely simple. They are usually historical, culturally specific and inherently complex. And while the XO laptop may have an expertly-designed-to-be-simple interace, it is anything but a simple solution.”