FORMULATIONS & FINDINGS One Laptop per Child Birmingham: Case Study of a Radical Experiment IJLM Mark Warschauer University of California, Irvine markw@uci.edu Shelia R. Cotten University of Alabama, Birmingham cotten@uab.edu Morgan G. Ames Stanford University morganya@stanford.edu Keywords One Laptop per Child educational reform program evaluation Visit IJLM.net doi:10.1162/IJLM_a_00069 c  2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license Volume 3, Number 2 Abstract The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program has sought to transform education by developing and distributing to low-income children around the world an inexpensive computer with an in- novative interface and applications. This article investigates the implementation of OLPC in Birmingham, Alabama, where some 15,000 of the group’s XO laptops were distributed to all first- through fifth-grade public school students and their teachers. Surveys were collected from a representative sample of children before and af- ter they received their laptops, supplemented by observations and interviews in a Birmingham school. The use of the XOs by teachers and schools, the ways social and technical infra- structure affected program implementation, and the types of XO use by students are examined. The disappointing results of the Birmingham program, which has been discontinued, are an- alyzed in relationship to OLPC’s technocentric approach, the organization’s principle of child ownership, and the design elements of the XO hardware and software. Warschauer, Cotten, and Ames / One Laptop per Child Birmingham 61