OLPC critiques go in my bucket labeled "there's no point in commenting - this is regrettably one of those topics illustrating the limited viability of collective rationality outside of a few peer review and embarrassment incentive structures". But how about this: OPLC was like a VC unicorn effort: either succeed by getting massive continental-scale buy-in with resulting network effects, else fail. Sort of the scale of what phone app stores became, but with a rather different focus. It failed - buy-in didn't happen. In part because of very active opposition from Intel and Microsoft. But instead the envisioned, quick and clear cut, win BIG or die, it found itself in a draw-out zombie twilight. The parts rotting off while crawling kind of zombie, not the chase you down for brains kind. And ever since, people have been standing over the smear of rotted bits, commenting how obviously silly it was to believe that rotted bits and smear could dramatically improve education.

For quick concrete example, wizzy professors and postdocs, who normally wouldn't invest in the creation of introductory content, were being attracted by the massiveness of the potential reach. Instead here we are, decades later, with US leading K-13 science textbooks you can easily win science-education-research list-of-common-misconceptions bingo on. NSF once almost created a national science education wiki... but didn't. Think of that scale, but bigger, of a "we almost, but no".