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The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per ChildMorgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press Published: October 2019 |
Review date: 4th April 2020
by David Longman, MirandaNet
Teachers who work with and think about the role of computing in education either as a tool or as an object worthy of study will find this is an important and interesting book. For some (including the author of this review) the idea that programming a computer could be a novel way to learn about important ideas in mathematics, language, physics or, a little recursively, computing has been a captivating way to think about the educational value of computers. This was particularly so when personal computers were becoming affordable for individuals and, with funding, for schools.
Such was the influence of Logo and the enormously creative work of Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon and many others at MIT during the 1960s and 1970s. Embedded in the artificial intelligence culture of the day, programming was viewed as a representational tool through which the mysteries of human thought could be unravelled. Hence Papert’s slogan, one of many, that learning through programming is a process of ‘thinking about thinking’.
We live in a different world today, but at that time when the power of computing was moving beyond its origins in electronics, mathematics and engineering into wider cultural arenas, there seemed no limit to the possibilities opened up by computation. In education, Seymour Papert became something of a prophet for this new tool that could bring a new perspective to ongoing philosophical and political debates about the purpose and control of education, especially at the school level.
The computer, it was said, could enable children to be free of a deterministic style of schooling that reduced learning to a prescribed sequence leading to predetermined outcomes regardless of individual potential or preference. School, in other words, was seen by many as a factory system steering children towards things that others had decided they should know and understand. Computers and programming, on the other hand, offered the potential for self-fulfilment through expressive thought experiments which reduced, if not eliminated, the need for instructional teaching. Papert and his milieu painted the computer as a tool of liberation and intellectual freedom through a philosophy of learning he termed ‘constructionism’.
Needless to say, it is the seductive ideas of liberation and freedom that is a key source of the charismatic power of constructionism. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan G. Ames presents a fascinating case study of a major effort to implement constructionist learning with computers at scale. Starting in 2007 she researched the project, including conducting ethnographic field work in Paraguay, following the experiences of participants and planners who were included in a pioneering implementation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The brain-child of Nicholas Negroponte, a like-minded enthusiast and colleague of Papert and a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab in 1985, the OLPC project was a significant experimental project for constructionist learning. The ‘charisma machine’ of the book’s title is the XO laptop which was created specifically for the OLPC project and drew on the intellectual and cultural background at MIT which informed its seductive rhetoric and ambitious educational goals.
The XO was intended to be a personal machine owned by each participating student in the project, for their use. Each machine included pre-loaded open-source software designed on constructionist principles to exemplify the core philosophy behind OLPC. Thus, it included an early version of Scratch, Turtle Art, and some other useful tools. The XO was also WiFi enabled and included a browser. Alongside the fieldwork looking at the use of the XO in school settings, Ames also explores a ‘historical anthropology’ of the intellectual culture at MIT. While the fieldwork illustrates a significant mismatch between the intentions of OLPC and the everyday uses to which the XO was put, her exploration of the cultural assumptions of the project is equally revealing and helps to explain many of the project’s shortcomings.
Some of the weaknesses of OLPC in Paraguay are by now familiar because they apply to almost any school trying to integrate laptop use into students’ lives. A lack of supporting infrastructure, particularly those in rural areas, for battery charging and for WiFi combined with the overstated robustness of the XO undermined the one-to-one use of the machines. Thus in classroom settings the XO had often to be shared, sometimes among three or more students, thus limiting the intended usefulness of the device as a personal machine, or teachers would have to design a curriculum that students could do either on paper or with a laptop. This, combined with a lack of professional development and training, left many teachers poorly prepared to work with the constructionist style of learning that ran counter to the more structured expectations of the school curriculum.
Urban schools were better placed but even here the expectation of a constructionist model of learning where kids would learn about computing through their own tinkering with software was thwarted by the overwhelming preference of the students for downloading music and videos from the internet. The centrality of the more entertainment-focused aspects of the world wide web as a source of cultural interest seems to have been thoroughly, perhaps mistakenly, underestimated by the OLPC project designers. This was almost certainly related to the strength of the constructionist convictions on the part of the project designers that children would naturally indulge their curiosity and explore ways to make the computer do interesting things.
The exploration of the assumptions of the project designers forms an valuable and fascinating aspect of this book and Ames shows convincingly that an implicit cultural hubris had a deep effect on the OLPC’s design. The notion of constructionism as conceived by the MIT community rested, Ames argues, on a gendered view of the idealised mind-set of the constructionist learner, namely the “technically precocious boy”. This image of the socially isolated boy, tinkering away in his bedroom on fascinating projects independently of the formalised schooling that he is obliged to endure undoubtedly pervades the cultural history of Silicon Valley where the household garage or bedroom den was a frequent site of technological invention and insight. However, the two main facets of this story – the socially isolated boy and the curiosity-crushing nature of the school curriculum – turn out to be almost entirely untrue. Almost without exception all the great minds inhabiting MIT (mostly men) experienced expensive and lengthy formal education. While many also tinkered none were lone geniuses.
This sexist myth clearly influenced OLPC projects on the ground. In one telling example Ames describes how, as the project developed, the project leaders searched for examples of constructionist learners who were using their XO to unpick the power of computation for learning. Few were found but one boy and one girl, in particular, were identified as concrete examples of the reality of constructionism at work. Yet when it was time to promote this positive effect it was the boy who was selected to travel to MIT and participate in an OLPC conference where he was, perhaps, regarded as a specimen of constructionism’s success.
This timely, well written book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of educational technology. Even for readers who have never fully subscribed to constructionist learning there is much here to ponder about how various myths and assumptions can influence our actions in the field of educational technology. The values that shaped the intellectual and social culture of the OLPC project remain influential to this day. On the positive side, constructionism as a model of teaching and learning remains active. However, sexist prejudice continues to be rife throughout the technology industry and cultural imperialism coupled with billionaire libertarianism continues to taint the force for good that so many global platforms, including OLPC at its inception, see themselves as representing.
Ames’ analysis does not provide a predictive tool. While she shows that the same charismatic stories do tend to recur, we cannot say in advance how charisma will appear and then seduce us nor the particular forms that persuasive rhetoric may take. The importance of this book is to alert us to how ideas about technology are situated in a context of assumptions and prejudices. It is up to us to be more confident about putting forward a critique that helps to balance overstated aspirations if and when they appear. This may be especially relevant in today’s educational landscape where the new curriculum emphasis on acquiring knowledge about computer science fuels expectations as strong as those promoted by Papert and Negroponte.