Meanwhile in India, the Hole-in-the-Wall project, providing internet access with no direction, assistance or teachers to illiterate street urchins, continues to produce amazing results as completely uneducated children teach themselves to read, communicate in English, do math, and many other skills.
This is a key distinction. Attempting to integrate laptops into existing curriculum with teacher training is a sisyphean task for deployments in countries where teachers haven't used (let alone taught with or seen someone teach with) any computer or smartphone before. OLPC made its classroom-transformative ideals clear, but, and this is purely speculation, the popular and misguided notion of what "ICT for Education" should be wins out nearly everywhere. Purchased laptops ended up being seen as something they can plug-and-play insert into the existing educational curriculum instead of complementing or supplanting any part of it.
OLPC's recipe, followed to a T, would probably work quite well. But the economics and politics of the situation mean these ideals are mutated to the point of inefficacy before the laptops reach the kids.
Technology can be plug-and-play and transformative for kids without adult supervision. Watch kids play games. The kids in OLPC deployments pick up the difficult-to-use laptop UI quickly, clicking around and finding ways to have fun with the cameras and make silly videos of their friends singing in the schoolyard when the teachers aren't looking.
But in the newly-laptopped classroom the teachers just can't help but revert back to the comfortable pattern of stepping kids through pointing and clicking all the while juggling laptops running out of battery, touchpads on the fritz, and the realities of a classroom full of children. And the teachers are not comfortable with this technology. It's another chapter in their teacher's manual they have to spend their free time to learn, however exciting and novel it is.
Get the kids anything with a thriving App Store and give them an internet connection. Set up computer clubs outside of school for structured growth and let them play.
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/