E-mentoring
An E-mentoring offer could match children owning OLPCs with adults in developed countries. The contact could have the primary purpose to increase awareness for each other and to stimulate intercultural competence while also training the language skills of pupils. With occasional emails the expenditure of time could be very limited for the participants and wouldn't have to impact on the ability to participate in local mentoring programs; quite to the contrary one could prefer adults with experience in any other kind of mentoring program so as to avoid qualification measures.
According to MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership 44 million adults in the USA are willing to serve as mentors. [1]
E-mentoring could also be a valuable addition to the curriculum for high school courses in pedagogics.
E-mentoring assignments
The assignment of mentor and protégé could be made randomly. Protégés could be allowed to opt-out before receiving any email but probably shouldn't receive more choices, which could raise expectations and consequently disappointment. Mentors could be allowed to select by languages spoken (obviously), country, gender and age group of the protégé.
High school courses could sign up as groups and request certain features for a group of assignments, e.g. scattering through the maximum number of countries and regions.
The OLPC could offer a registration process (similar to that of MacOS X) to allow pupils to sign up for E-mentoring and to register their machines.
