Walter Bender, the Founder of Sugar Labs, recently gave a talk (link to YouTube) in Goa titled "Learning to Change the World". In the talk Walter makes the distinction between education and learning. Education is something that is "done to you" and learning is something "you do". Schools educate but children learn or should learn. This distinction extends to information, where the two choices are creating information and consuming it. Creating information is the active development of content in whatever form and consuming is the more passive processing of what is available. Extending these ideas, learning is a process of creation and education is a process of consuming.
If we consider technology in this framework, we have two choices. We can either focus on education and consuming or we can focus on learning and creation. Many people ask if technology makes a difference in schools. If the technology merely fosters consumption and education then it probably makes only a small difference. We have had excellent techniques for educating students for hundreds of years and the technology makes only a marginal improvement, if any. On the other hand if the technology, and here we mean 1:1 computing, is used to encourage the creativity and exploration of the child then we foster creation and learning.
In Walter's speech he talks about the mistakes and successes of teams at MIT over the last 30 years in trying to foster 1:1 computing and the process of creation and learning by students. Improving education and consumption through technology is easy. It is much more of an ongoing challenge to find effective ways to foster learning.
The risk is that we take the easy road and just try to improve education. The results, although well publicized, will be minimal with a low return on investment (if measured). Projects like OLPC and similar 1:1 initiatives may not be a perfect solution, but they are tackling the hard question of how to foster learning through computers and that's the question we should all be working on.