Project N fail

I think one of the best nursing blogs out there is impactEDnurse (note: not ImpactedNurse). I don't follow it regularly, but recently Ian wrote that Project N, his and his readers' attempt to get textbooks to a Nigerian nursing school, seemed to have not come off well.

Of course, when I read this, my first thought was, don't they have the Internet? The obvious solution to continuously outdated textbooks is to create a digital, collaborative, open access textbook and try to get as many laptops to third world nursing schools as possible. In the short term, that takes a much larger capital investment, but I suspect it would save in the long term. Of course, the biggest problem is that the OLPC laptop is so constricted in its target audience. I don't understand why MIT didn't just create a laptop for third world nations in general instead of targeting children. Do the advantages of their ideas cease once you get beyond childhood or get out from total poverty into significant poverty?

There are other possibilities like the Koolu Works Everywhere Appliance, although at $299 + monitor, it is not really a substitute. Again, why there isn't something like a cross between OLPC and the WEA is beyond me, since the advantages of both are so great, but !!

Anyhow, a second thought I had was for nursing schools in first-world nations to adopt those in third-world nations. It could actually be made into a nice international relations/networking program. Say one nursing school each in Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, and the US collaborated on a school in Africa. You couldn't help very many schools this way, but you could help a few and it might be fun!