I've been doing some reading about Constructivist educational theories, related to OLPC. I came upon this:

I react strongly against the thought that we need to provide children with only a set of intellectual processes -- a dry, contentless set of tools that they can go about applying. I believe that the tools cannot help developing once children have something real to think about; and if they don't have anything real to think about, they won't be applying tools anyway. That is, there really is no such thing as a contentless intellectual tool. If a person has some knowledge at his disposal, he can try to make sense of new experiences and new information related to it. He fits it into what he has. By knowledge I do not mean verbal summaries of somebody else's knowledge. I am not urging textbooks and lectures. I mean a person's own repertoire of thoughts, actions, connections, preductions, and feelings. Some of these may have as their source something read or heard. But the individual has done the work of putting them together for himself or herself, and they give rise to new ways to put them together.

-- Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas pg 13

A little earlier I was reading an article Hole-in-the-Wall which I found very interesting, and saw some connection here:

Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, "What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?" He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, "Look here guys. I have a little problem for you." They read the questions and said they didn't understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, "Here's a terminal. I'll give you two hours to find the answers."

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn't mean much. But I said to him, "Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject." So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, "They don't know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn't know."

One of the most exciting things about OLPC is simply about bringing internet access to these children. The internet is a tool, not an ends, but it's one hell of a tool. It's limited because it is just content, it is not the kind of informed and wordly intellectual toolset Duckworth talks about. The problem with the laptop is that it is far better at conveying information than process, so it is very possible it could become just a textbook, and children would only interact by creating "verbal summaries of somebody else's knowledge". This particularly resonates with me, because that style of education was particularly frustrating to me as a student.

The good thing about the laptop (combined with the internet) is that the internet has such an overwhelming quantity of information it doesn't work well for textbook-style education. You don't read the internet and then answer questions to check your reading comprehension. Even a more constrained set of content like Wikipedia is structured in a non-linear form; you can't make it linear even if you want to.

Of course you can still put a textbook online. You can still force students to read it linearly and respond to it in a controlled and limited way. The internet and this laptop are not coercive, and they can't force instructors to do something. They can only help clear a path to a better kind of education; of that I'm optimistic.