Three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have embarked on an ambitious plan to close the global digital divide: They're recruiting corporate partners to join MIT in designing and mass-producing basic, durable laptops costing $100 or less that hundreds of millions of children worldwide--perhaps even U.S. students--could use at school and home.

The "one laptop per child" plan could give children internet- and multimedia-capable computers to make laptops as ubiquitous as cell phones in the world's technology-deprived regions.

At the same time, kids could get their parents hooked.

"It's a way of having the children be the agents of change," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab and chairman of the 2B1 Foundation, which is seeking to bring computer technology to the developing world, told the Associated Press. "They bring the device home, and then the parents look over their shoulder."

Negroponte and MIT colleagues Joe Jacobson and Seymour Papert expect the laptops will be equipped with Wi-Fi capability to share broadband links at school, and could serve as entertainment devices at home. Kids could link their laptops--with one serving as a DVD player, another as a sound device, and a third providing data storage.

The project isn't entirely without precedent. Maine has a first-in-the-nation middle school program now in its third year that put $300 laptops in the hands of more than 34,000 seventh- and eighth-graders and teachers. But at $300 apiece, the devices are still too expensive for most schools or communities in poor areas of the country or the world to consider.

The $100 laptop project still faces many hurdles. Al Hammond, director for the nonprofit World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend project in Washington, D.C., worries that customer support in poor, rural areas could prove a big obstacle.

"The key is to create something affordable and sufficiently robust to protect against voltage surges, against dust, and against being dropped, and against all the perils of the internet," Hammond said. "Those things are more important if the nearest computer tech is three villages away and you don't have an air-conditioned office to work in."

Like Hammond, Andy Carvin, director of the Newton, Mass.-based nonprofit Digital Divide Network, applauds the project's goals, calling an extremely low-cost, durable laptop "one of the holy grails of bridging the digital divide."

But he said increasingly sophisticated and versatile wireless handhelds, like high-end "smart" cell phones and Blackberry devices, might gain favor over laptops as the developing world's online tools of choice.

"That's not to suggest we should not have an inexpensive laptop," Carvin said. "They're parallel tracks, and it's probably a healthy competition to have both."

The digital divide is believed to be narrowing, but it remains vast.

Technology research firm IDC, based in Framingham, Mass., examined 53 countries and determined that a household in Canada was 131 times more likely to own a personal computer than one in Indonesia--hardly the world's least tech-oriented country. The U.S. trailed Canada at No. 2 by that measure in rankings that examined computer use in countries that fall in the top third for advanced technology use.