Making a shared computer PERSONAL - An experiment in education

Disclosure - this is an overview post, please lookup Sikshana blog for actual details / instances etc.
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As part of the Sikshana process, Subbu (the resident computing / education expert) was posed with a simple question : If we distribute a laptop / class in the rural schools, how do individual students preserve their own environment and work over several days / periods / sessions ?

The problem seems simple - but, this has a major impact on the psyche of the individual kid. Today, if a child is working on a drawing / painting project, there is a good chance that while using the shared computer, another child will over-write / update / change the first child's work.

Even if that happens on a rare occasion, the child is left disillusioned about the whole project.
This is a tremendous problem not just with sharing, but, also with preserving the session as "active" so that there is no loss in time the next instance the child logs onto the system.

Subbu has come up with an ingenious solution (I believe). The idea is to provide a USB chip with enough software to make the chip the default session handler.

Every kid is given a 2 GB chip (Sikshana is in the process of distributing a 1000 of these to kids), which the child owns.

Every time the child accesses the computer, the child inserts his / her own chip and is up and away immediately. Saves time and also the heartbreak of having someone else destroy one's own work.

The question in my mind is : Is this not the same for offices too ? Can we not make this a commercial process ?