While the concept of the $100 laptop sounds attractive in theory, I have to say that as a former ESL teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate about it (it probably doesn't help that I've just started reading William Easterly's The White Man`s Burden) and ask what's the point? Doesn't this assume a baseline of literacy in order to use the operating system and software?

I have no experience with Africa, but when I worked in ESL/literacy a lot of students from rural/marginalized communities where they'd never had access to literacy education and couldn't read/write in their native language, let alone International Standard English. So without really knowing very much about this initiative, my reaction is that you could give laptops to the students I used to work with, but they really wouldn't be able to use the software or be active users of the web because they couldn't read. As an aside, that's actually how I got into libraries (and do volunteer work for a really great organization, Read Nepal) - books can be expensive and scarce. Making those more available in order to promote and continue to foster literacy, seems to be more of a first step than the Internet or technology.