MARK WARSCHAUER The Digital Divide and Social Inclusion
Uruguay has the only national one-computer-per-child XO deployment, with
more than 500,000 XOs in
use by primary and secondary school students and
teachers across the country. With a per capita GDP
of nearly $15,000 and a well-organized Ministry of Education and Culture, Uruguay is
well situated to organize a laptop program, and has put
substantial funding into technical infrastructure and support. Wireless connectivity has been extended throughout the country and 98 percent of children with XOs can
reportedly access the Internet at school. 9 Relay points
are being set up to extend this access beyond the school,
with the goal of bringing a wireless hot spot within 300
meters (984 feet) of children’s homes. 10
Initial teacher training of eight hours is now being
supplemented with training materials that will be delivered online or via television. The government offers
free repairs for any laptop that malfunctions following
proper use and subsidizes the repair of laptops that break
due to user error.
Yet hardware and soft ware problems remain a serious
concern. Some 30 percent of laptops are out of commission
at any given time, with the highest rates of unrepaired
computers in low-income communities. 11 In addition,
the laptops get relatively infrequent use in schools. Nevertheless, even at a minimum, the program’s extension
of Internet access may bring benefits, and surveys suggest that the program is popular among parents, teachers and administrators. 12
In 2007, the government of Peru ordered 290,000 laptops for use on an individual basis by children in rural
schools, and Lima has since reportedly ordered about
600,000 more, making it the world’s largest purchaser
of XO laptops. A preliminary evaluation carried out by
the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and an independent investigation each suggest that the program
has become mired in infrastructure difficulties. 13 A number of the country’s rural schools still lack electricity, and
others that do have electricity sometimes have only one
outlet in the principal’s office, making charging—and
subsequently using—the laptops difficult.
There is also the problem of training teachers. According to the 2010 IDB study, only 10. 5 percent of teachers
report receiving technical support and 7 percent report
receiving pedagogical support for laptop use.
Students’ use of laptops for learning will
depend on the kinds of technical and
social support they receive.
Even when training was offered, teachers in one-room
schools are often unable to abandon their classrooms to
attend the training, and are typically unwilling to travel
for unpaid training during their vacation time. Less than
half the students bring the laptops home, since many
teachers or parents forbid it out of fear they will be held
responsible if the computers are damaged.
A follow-up study by the IDB in 2012 compared students who used the laptops to control groups of students
in similar contexts who were not provided laptops. After
15 months of use, the study found there was no statistically significant positive impact on children’s academic
achievement in reading or math. 14
What the evaluation did find was that students who
used the laptops had advanced more in cognitive tests
measuring non-verbal abstract reasoning, verbal fluency
and processing speed. These differences were statistically significant only for the non-verbal reasoning test,
though they were also significant when combined into
a single overall cognitive ability measure. Overall, they
were estimated to represent an advantage of about five
extra months of cognitive development for the students
using laptops over a four-year period. The study found
that the positive cognitive gains were concentrated in
schools that began with higher academic achievement
and that boys gained more technological skills from using the laptops than girls did.
Unlike Uruguay, Peru never moved on to a national
one-laptop-per-child program. In 2010, the government
announced that subsequent deployments of the XOs
would be to schools rather than to individuals, with students sharing the laptops in their school’s technology resource centers. 15
Though OLPC originally targeted developing countries, XO laptops have also been distributed in some
developed countries, such as the U.S., Canada and Australia. The largest U.S. deployment of XOs occurred in
Birmingham, Alabama, a city with high poverty. The
program was initiated by Larry Langford and John Kato-podis, mayor and city council president at the time. To
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133 Americas Quarterly SPRING 2012
