And I didn’t write it… Ethan Zuckerman was in Cambridge, MA right after I was there, meeting with the One Laptop Per Child folks, and he has put together a stunning post about his visit and the laptop itself. The entire post should be read, but for the moment, I want to focus in on the closing paragraphs:

Hearing the ambitions for arming students with powerful, programmable learning devices, my skepticism comes to the surface. Not because I think the machine is not up to the task – instead, I suspect schools are likely to fall short. In much of the world – and, unfortunately, too often in the US as well – schools favor discipline, control and rote learning over creativity, self-directed learning and collaboration. No matter how you slice it, the laptop is a deeply subversive creature, likely to undercut the authority of teachers who don’t figure out how to master the device as quickly as their students. Like everyone else who’s worked in IT and international development, I’ve got nightmare stories about computers locked in rooms so no one will break them. It’s too easy for me to imagine teachers threatened by the laptop ordering students to put them away and watch the blackboard.

(one paragraph deleted — really, go read the whole thing)

But really taking advantage of the potential of the laptop requires changing the entire ecosystem of education in the developing world, a process that’s going to require more time than the year or two after laptops are distributed… and the efforts of people other than very bright MIT professors. The scale and scope of this project means that a large portion of the questions I most want to ask – how will this be used in the classroom? will teachers accept it? how will kids cope if machines break or get stolen? what happens when people use machines to do decidedly antisocial things? or creative and entrepreneurial things? – are really hard to answer until the machine is out in the field. I wonder out loud if it would make sense to do a small pilot before the project goes further – Jim points out that the current plan to distribute five million laptops in five nations next year is a pilot – when you’re talking about building and distributing more than two billion devices, a few million is just a toe dipped into the water.

Wonderful questions — and incredibly important questions. The entire project does beg the question — can technology be the tail that wags the pedagogical dog? Will the developing nations where these laptops will be distributed spend the money to create the necessarily staff development? How much of that staff development can be done online with tools such as moodle so that teachers can learn about the laptops and the promise of the technology while they use the tool? If the teachers don’t get the training they need, will they be in a position to affect change? Will they want to? If we don’t give the teachers they support they need, will they give in to fear, uncertainty and doubt?

Can this project change the world, change our schools? Does the promise of the technology that so many of speak of outweight the negative side of all the communication technology? Will the children of the developing world find ways to use these tools in productive ways or have we exposed a few more million kids to porn, flash games, and online shopping for things we really don’t need?

In the end, of course, it’s not an either or proposition. Kids will do amazing things will the laptops that expand their views of the world in powerful ways. They’ll also create MySpace pages that say things their parents won’t always appreciate. In many ways, the laptops are Pandora’s Box… they’ll change the world because they are transformative tools, not merely additive ones. The problem is that we won’t be able to control or predict the changes. Maybe that’s not the problem… certainly for some it is.

As to the issues of scale… I think they are right to start big (and 5-10 million laptops isn’t a small rollout, maybe compared to world population, but still….) With luck, with planning, there will be enough places where amazing things happen that there will be a critical mass to affect real, lasting, positive change. And perhaps that change will spread to this country as well.

I was talking about this project earlier today, and I think the American educational establishment had better realize — we’ve got a year and a half before this hits. How will America respond if the developing world leapfrogs this country in education? What happens when South America and Africa have more and better examples of 21st Century schools than we do? How quickly will America adapt? Or will we continue to cling to old models, citing the worst case scenarios of the Laptop project, rather than studying the best?

No matter what, I think this project will be the most interesting thing going on over the next three or four years in education. Hell, I love that we even get to ask the questions… let alone see what answers the project brings.