2008 has been, by some accounts, the year of the explosion of the education-focused subnotebook (the EdSub).
In April, Intel released the 2nd generation of its Classmate design spec. HP announced it's own design of a EdSub -- the Mini-Note 2133. OLPC had major news of its own -- the ability to have your completely open-sourced laptop configured with the mother of all anti-open-source operating systems, Microsoft Windows. See the announcement here.
The flurry of activity this year still begs the question of usage models. As far as I can tell, there are no generally accepted models of instruction that are designed specifically for a 1:1 student to computer ratio. So even at $200 or $300 per unit, there doesn't seem to be a massive rush to outfit every student with a laptop.
In fact, some educators I've spoken to have indicated a willingness to question whether laptops are the way to go at all. One educator in South Carolina shared their district's intention of achieving 1:1 ratios with thin client computers. They found that the maintenance costs of laptops far overshadowed the value of being able to move the computer around -- that there were plenty of valuable improvements to be had with 1:1 without assuming the cost of allowing mobility.
Outside of the US, large scale deployments of 1:1 initiatives seem to reside primarily in the realm of headline grabbers -- not so much in the realm of effective solutions for improving education. One company I'm familiar with has invested substantially into 1:1 computing in schools in India, only to realize that the Indian education system, with its emphasis on teacher-in-front, fact-regurgitation-based learning, and its relative lack of reliable Internet infrastructure to schools, let alone homes, was not a ripe market for 1:1 laptops necessarily. Lots of instructional methodologies and infrastructural issues need to be addressed before the investment can be expected to pay off.
Interestingly, the US remains the primary market for 1:1 programs to be deployed, and thus the primary location where effective instructional methodologies will be developed and evaluated. I continue to maintain that having an easy-to-use, web-based environment that facilitates managing content, student data, communications, collaboration, will be a critical piece to insure the success of any 1:1 initiative.
