Ceibal Project: A Country-Wide Gamble on Educational Technology

Alan Kay sent me a link to this interesting video.  I hadn’t heard of the Ceibal Project before — according to the video, 100% of schoolchildren in Uruguay now have OLPC laptops, and 92% of the schools have Internet access. It’s a big gamble.  The Economist says that project is “less than 5% of the education budget.”  The video paints a compelling picture of improving the society through equalized access to information.  (The Wikipedia article on the Ceibal Project is interesting in a weird way.  It’s decidedly negative in tone, but with odd complaints like potential access to pornography and bacteria being transported on keyboards.)

It’s such a huge project that I wonder how you measure it’s impact.  Do you measure learning at the individual student level, or do you look for larger social trends (e.g., how often do the computers appear in television, and how often do people talk about using computers or seeking a job in IT?)?  I am curious as to how the curriculum changes with the technology.  Do we see schools introducing computer science, because now they can?