Michael Trucano of the World Bank's EduTech blog has posted a valuable round-up of various evaluations of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilots around the world. Michael warns that many of the evaluations are of short-term and small-scale pilots, which limits our ability to extrapolate.
However, the Inter-American Development Bank and others have started evaluations of much larger OLPC implementations, most notably in Peru. But here's another question for the evaluators out there (and one that Michael asks, albeit very nicely, in his post) - can you really get an accurate evaluation of a high-profile project when so many parties have a vested interest in seeing it succeed? Not that there's anything wrong with wanting a project to succeed, but what happens when the next development fad comes around, and the OLPC is no longer the cool new kid on the block? The same question would seem to apply to a whole range of interventions (the Millennium Villages immediately come to mind).
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