One Laptop per child (http://laptop.org/) is developed to provide children around the world with new affordable opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.

It is predicated upon three premises:

• High-quality education for everyone to provide equitable socially viable society
• Dramatic improvement of education on a national scale
• To reduce gap of participation among the unprivileged

OLPC team argues that by providing powerful tools for knowledge creation, and by providing connectivity to enable development of knowledge communities, we will have the means to address critically important issues.

OLPC has witnessed significant educational gains among its pilot schools. However they observed inherent limitations due to insufficient content to substantially change school curriculum. As Robert Kozma, an international consultant on technology in service of developing countries states, " mere introduction of computers into schools will not bring about educational improvement. Reforming education is hard work that involves making coordinated changes in pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher training, as well as technology."

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of One Laptop per Child association, has consistently pointed out that OLPC is an education project and not a laptop project. Many educators disagree with Negroponte and find the project fundamentally incomplete.

Kozma argues that to reform education in developing countries, curricula needs to be changed to move from rote learning to problem solving, creative thinking and team skills. He believes that to bring about education reform, OLPC needs to connect and work with Ministries of Education in developing countries.

I do believe that Kozma's point is significant, given the experience that I had through my own education in Iran. But since I have been involved with Project New Media Literacies as well as Scratch software developed through Life Long Kindergarten at MIT's media lab, I believe that OLPC should team up with such projects to get closer to its goal. Project NML can provide OLPC with literacies and skills that kids need to acquire in order to participate and eventually fill their education gap. Through online learning and with the advent of web 2.0, developing countries can fill the gap in their education theories and learning. I don't necessarily believe that ministries of education need to collaborate with OLPC in order to make it successful. If after school programs and educators implement strategies such as the ones that NML provides, OLPC can become tremendously successful.

The interesting factor is that OLPC, NML as well as Scratch are all initiatives developing through MIT. It's time for them to have a talk and come up with strategies together to fill the education gap in developing countries even if they have different interests in small things. If that happens then we could agree with Negroponte in that OLPC is not a laptop project and that it is an education one.