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But this does not seem to apply to the One Laptop Per Child project. That is the only way one can explain its most recent effort to try and spin the devastating results of a detailed and scientific survey in Peru which shows clearly that the program does nothing to help education.
Five qualified individuals wrote the study, after surveying 315 schools over 15 months. Peru has the largest deployment of OLPC laptops; there are 850,000 deployed at a cost, to the government, of $US225 million.
Ever since the media wrote about the study - and conclusions were uniform across the spectrum as to the fact that the OLPC program is of zero value in education - the OLPC has been trying to spin this way and that in order to try and hose down evidence that is out there on the net, evidence that clearly indicates that the whole project is just tampering with the early years of the most vulnerable in our world - children in poor and developing countries.
The most recent bid at trying to obfuscate the evidence from the survey comes from Oscar Becerra, former chief educational technologies officer in the Peruvian Ministry of Education. Becerra first wrote a rejoinder to The Economist (its write-up of the study was headlined Error Message).
He then wrote an article for OLPC News, a site that says of itself "dear reader, you should know that the editors behind OLPC News are not objective reporters of the latest news. We are most definitely biased." I don't think I need to specify in which direction the bias lies.
Firstly, when quotes are used from a document, then those exact phrases should be found in the original. Becerra takes some liberties with his quotes; one for example is his claim that the phrase "positive effects were found in general cognitive skills" exists in the survey. The actual phrase is "some positive effects were found in general cognitive skills" (emphasis mine) which does tend to change the meaning to a large extent.
