The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child | Morgan Ames | Design@Large

[Music] [Music] with a hero journey 60d in the world what are those visions visions why do we need to keep going back to those so she's going to be sharing with us the story of one Laptop Per child project which brought a lot of people's energy is a wide range of institutions a bunch of different countries and so this is a really important story for anyone who wants to development its foundation projects fantastic so she had some really exciting conversations with all of you this afternoon and I encourage you to come afterwards too if you would like to stay I also just want to point out I have one of the but you want to actually interact with the material object so this is a brief summary of my book with that might be press and I won't be ever able to cover that's clearly but I'm hoping to project a few of the key questions that it might illuminate about other projects in the world so first you know what do I mean when I say the crus machine or charismatic technologies and what does it mean to study a project that is quotable charismatic for me studying projects like this necessarily it has a graphic component where we have to look at what these technologies are in the world but it also has a historical component to ask where did the ideas that candidate this technology to get people excited about this how did he come from where they come up and so so I'm going to kind of branch into those two different areas I went well a little bit more on the historical just to give everyone some background because I feel like that's kind of the meat that we can take forward but I will also draw on and the monarchy I did or project but in 1 laptop I'll project in Paraguay in 2013 to talk about how the charisma of the laptop translated to this particular place and how it was kind of different and a few other projects I'm competing more broadly than this can tell us something about educational projects development projects many of them happen to kind of tap into these kinds of their technologies making kind of charismatic in a similar way there's certainly a you talking thread and design although and also there's a kind of underlying ideology of engineering practice where generally that many of us might take for granted we might be so immersed in it and certainly I was as a computer science student and for granted until I had already started looking at lots of different perspective isn't kind of questioning the assumptions I was making so I want to give a very brief history One Laptop Per child they will work this is just a very brief promo video those that in 2007 shortly before a 1:1 campaign this is how about my laptop connect to others at home base you could pay $400 for a laptop you would give one and then one would go to a contract most of them ended up in 80 and it kind of describes it fairly briefly the philosophy we education that's why rarity XO goes there are five four principles had one agrees to first kids get to keep the laptops they have to agree to take them home use don't hurt the education which means kids about 6 to 12 years old there we had a human large numbers of laptops so whole classrooms and schools get them at the same time so no one gets like that or kids should have a connection to the Internet because there's neat stuff to marry into it there's been finally the SOS team is a free and open source software and the laptop itself can easily grow and adapt with the needs of the child so in a nutshell that's us an organization that makes computers a certain big cost bringing education to children all over the world there's one laptop okay so so I'm going to there we go so supplementing this I just wanted to grab one quote from Nicholas Negroponte a he was the spokesperson for this project and an appointed MIT thank you machine and it's really a core feature and he would he had a proclivity to say things that were understood him in a lot of ways he said for example I don't want a place too much on it well we see but if I really have to look at how do we make poverty create peace and work on the environment I can't even better than to it so this might sound very extreme a little bit from Posterous but there are a lot of people who so I'm going to get back to these these five principles but I just want to call your attention to the crane right way free and open source software is framed as free to throw an intact giving one tall children means no one gets left out so there's there's already some kind of training around but as the values that are better than a laptop here so what do I mean when I say charismatic technology we saw in this very short commercial a promise right there's a promise out there in the world about what this laptop is supposed to do it's it's design but its design is is not the end-all be-all this isn't kind of a fetish object in that way what its design is meant to do is provoke a particular kind of economic development social development uplift you might say in the world there's this vision gives the project a sense of purpose direction and conviction it drew together a lot of people from really all over the world for a really passionate about the idea of a copper tile it made progress seen inevitable and funny we often say you can hand these laptops out and literally walk away literally walk away you don't have any infrastructure in place or anything else we'll see a little bit later that that's more complicated but that kind of inevitable progress or maybe easy progress was an important part of the story that very people to this technology along those same lines at foreclose alternatives it made this laptop seem like the right answer and other projects not necessarily the right answer and I'm going to make an argument coming up but this was it's always ideologically conservative conservative with the small C not a big so this isn't kind of you know a political valence in the kind of liberal conservative debates more broadly but it speaks to a certain status quo in the technology world more broadly in American culture more broadly that the Peanuts people that kind of held them up as important as as world changers so we'll get to that a little bit first though I do just want to address you know we have especially in this last year under God in the tech industry a lot of the kind of cataclysmic change in a way that actually might be shifting the dialogue away from sorts of the narratives like well that popper shop so watching that that One Laptop Per child commercial with our 2019 brains we might be like right this last year in particular you know words reveal there was a crash there was Mark Zuckerberg testimony in front of Congress there's all sorts of places where the tech industry could be in a lot of ways and so as best you can I want you to put this aside and put on those 2005 hats many of you might have been very young at that point but but try to imagine the technology world in 2005 and that's not to say there weren't any controversies there were a lot of things happening even then but the overall zeitgeist will still be positive maybe so as we saw before we have five core principles children should own laptops not parents schools not government's children they aimed at kind of elementary school age pretty young saturation all kids should have one connection they should be on the internet and free and open-source software and then the last one in particular drew in a very large community of people interested in promoting free and open source software across the global South a few of the key members of LPC's leadership include senator Ponte you've heard a little bit from him already he was definitely be the public face of the project he was traveling around the world in two thousand five six and seven even talks about well not a popular style of TED Talks called face I'm also going to focus in a bit on Seymour capper who was in many ways I'm gonna focus on these two Walter bender Mary Lou Jepsen were also very important and there were a number of other people who have had big impacts on it these were kind of the ones so negroponte aid would often credit pepper in his public talks we inspiration to the project for example in a talk you know the interview he did for the web he said the initial ideas for One Laptop Per child came in the late 1960s and early 70s when a man may see more pepper it made a very simple observation and that was that children learn differently when they write computer programs because the act of writing a computer program is the closest you can come to thinking about thinking so there was a lot that it's kind of packed into this there might be no so I'll unpack a little bit going forward so pepper is known for a learning theory called construction and this was in many ways the motivation for One Laptop Per child along with some of their kind of visionary tokenism constructionism has a lot in common with jang hee-jae's constructivism and in fact the names are not even my adviser would often kind of use the interchange in marketing and they are certainly often confused and in fact before joining in my tea packard spent five years studying with Vijay in Hiva and pepper adopts from constructivism a focus on show as faculty process of constructing knowledge about the world relating new concepts of things they already know kind of building an edifice of knowledge Packard departs from em from Piaget though in several important ways and this demonstrates one of the other major influences on his life which he often discussed in his writing that Martinez and the lab that Marvin's team and MIT so here we have pepper here in Minsky over here one thread of influence here is pepper instead packs focus on computers as what he would call teaching and learning or and this was especially kind of prevalent in his book 1980 book bestsellers still often assign new designs was today called Mindstorms children computers and powerful ideas here he describes the logo programming language which had been in development not just like in my whole group of people at tea and elsewhere throughout the 70s but it explicate kind of the dimensions and construction zone nice and Mindstorms was published at really a kind of perfect time in a world the personal computer was just starting to pay off there is this very strong interest in teaching kids to program and one of the main tools for it at the time was basic some of you might even be familiar with basic a little bit of basic it's still out there it's still a tool that people use in the world to teach programming sometimes but it's you know fairly kind of dry and the idea that happened before word in mind certain and further writing was that logo is what a much more kind of playful intuitive replacement for basic so so here we can kind of see this would be sort of an example of what you could do in logo you have a little turtle turtle graphics you can move it around that was often kids first kind of introduction to logo and of course we have one laptop per child is another instantiation of constructionism but there are actually a lot of other projects between nineteen eighties logo in fact I encountered in my own elementary school I don't know if if others use the logo at the time and one laptop per child so also kind of contemporaneous with the rise of the world we see a scratch the stretch programming language this was also inspired by constructionism and built in fact by when a Packard furnish a snoot resonate and his lab and this group Packard collaborated with Lego in the 1990s nucleo Mindstorms we have Mickey making midgets also kind of sighting papperman in the Media Lab that sequence inspiration the Fablab makers face framework this is not all making your spaces clearly but we're going to fab that model also go back to my team image and then we have a whole lot of turtle riffs on Turtles to help kids learn the program on including even a board game so why constructionism has resonated this long and throughout so many different projects respect in 1964 when packard join NID to conduct research with Marvin Minsky and first encountered mi t--'s Mason's hacker culture at the time so this is a picture taken in Nancy's lab become years earlier and pepper encounter with this hacker group and MIT would set the course for the rest of his life's work and he often wrote about this very candidly in his in his own writings he explained that one of the main reasons he decided to join in today he was what he called the service wonderful sense of playfulness that I encountered there on brief visits this came together he said in mind sorts in all my sessions are having a pdp-1 computer that had a game engine is he it was pure play so here we start to see the kind of resonance between computer use and play that really creates constructionism so so this sort of set up the computer as this Proteus of machines was something to appeal to everybody ironically though the hacker group would at least as they've been written about in various accounts often sort of reveled in their 80s and recei they knew that they were not like everybody else they knew that many people out there didn't understand computers and didn't like computers and they love that they did and they understood this this machine it's liked it was interesting that even in the midst of years of societies in the 1960s early 1970s computers provided in this hacker group a common topic and over and the technology industry today carries this idea that computers can be Liberatore this idea is certainly core to One Laptop Per child and its portly spend several it were several decades has been core in many different EdTech projects development projects and a prostitute accrue more generally though this could be shared in future years so sorry this is quote computer is the Proteus machines as essences it's University ality universality its power to simulate because it can take on a thousand forms and serve a thousand functions it can appeal to a thousand tastes so this is a Packard's idea bringing this pure play to but what is it going to liberate what our computers Aminta liberate in caverns filled and this comes back to some ideas around childhood and the natural creativity of childhood that are pervasive not just across the temporal but across American culture more generally an impact it's they're still permits that it's very easy to kind of take them for granted assume that the horse children are always creative of course they're you know naturally you know more noble they're not tied down by all the petty responsibilities and social niceties that adults are right but it's important to understand that these imagine the social imaginary children it's historically geographically and socioeconomically bounded as well as gender in which I feel like this image was 1898 painting kind of X we have boys roughhousing here and the girls in there currently this imaginary chat would precess its roots to 19th century reform efforts that attempted to take children out of newly built factories where they were being employed as workers and place them into schools now this sounds very altruistic there's also a kind of culturally imperialistic and just do it though because this was also a time of great waves of immigration and so there's a you know a moral sense that we need to take these unwashed you know great masses and American citizens so there were some very strong reform movements starting in the 1840s with Horace Mann and going on all the way through the Great Depression when school was really kind of institutionalized on the national level to make to set childhood aside legally and structurally as a state distinct from adult of it this has its roots and kind of enlightenment writing but it really did not gain traction for the Industrial Revolution so threads of this individualism creativity we're taking up more while widely and accentuated in American ideologies of childhood in particular in post-war America so this is when people were coming back the GI Bill allowed particular classes of people to buy houses in the suburbs all across the US and the idea that children needed their own place a private room in which they eat all of their their enriching toys became overly widespread one and so here creativity natural creativity of children became this kind of individualized project that children were meant to kind of be even more separate from adults so finally we have computers as his previous machines we have the natural created child and finally we have this sense of rebellion so against this these social imaginary the natural and creative child was a kind of counter imaginary of the sultan fine school factory model of schooling right and again this is one that is very familiar it's one that we hear even quoted in news all the time and the idea that children should rebel against this is also something that is kind of deeply ingrained in our kind of cultural mythology is somebody movies all the time media get in all the way back to Sawyer and pin these kinds narratives and the kind of rebellion that is generally sanctioned is sort of summed up by the by the phrase boys will be boys right so we can think of of the kinds of balances gendered balances may be class balances racial balances in boys will be boys and hoo-hoos kind of rebellion is sanctioned or even encouraged as free thinking individualism so you know One Laptop Per child and a lot of other projects who have tapped into this imaginary of school as this unchanging kind of stultifying an institution pepper for example in a televised speech in the mid nineteen eighty said nothing is ridiculous than the idea that this technology can used to improve school it's going to display school in a way we have understood at school what's wrong with school is absolutely fundamental so there were a lot of statements like this in his writing but a lot of statements in pop culture more generally so this idea rebellion kind of got channeled into the computing industry in a kind of mass way in the 1980s and this is when it kind of hit pop culture the idea of kind of the boy hacker hacking into a system for a prank or for some laughs and then with all the fallout from this and and there's there have been a number of other scholars that's shown how this has its roots in some of the kind of countercultural sixties into computing cultures and through this the social imaginary what I call it a technically precocious boy and this is one that had been kind of developing for a number of years through engineering toys heater toys that were marketed to boys in particular but it got kind of ported over into the unique cultures of seventeen especially in the movies with depictions like this okay so we have this rebellion we have this idea of clueless Factory in particular and set of a sort of collection of flawed maybe flawed schools you know they're not perfect but there are certainly aspirational institutions the social imaginary really focus on the meaningless rote nature of school and it often where trade school is untouched by time as as you know this is a sort of legible sort of imaginary to even though this was taken over a hundred years ago of course there have been some changes and scholars have pointed out these changes but but again it's imaginary something that we encounter in our culture I often okay so so I just want to revisit briefly this idea of the charismatic technology we saw promise and possibility or promise of an action yes as the purpose Direction mission make progress seem inevitable for close-up alternatives and I just discuss how this is ideologically conservative right it's happening into these larger imaginaries of childhood of schooling of the role of rebellion against Authority and and it's those that made this project resonate and then to those that can make other projects resonate - it's not that these are the only ones out there but but these are ones I have seen kind of recur in so again we have Christmas computers Christmas childhood especially boyhood as it's often more trade and Christmas of rebellion against school I just want to take a moment and talk about what the model of cultural change in one laptop your child is because one critique it often received is that this was this culturally imperialistic project right like here is this project deeply steeped in kind of American ideals and imaginaries is going to be sent around the world and it was going to teach kids to program all over the world and the founders were very clear that the goal their goal was for kids to come to love programming it to love learning through this machine so one way they tried to diffuse that was to say well it's open source so if they want to change it they can write course programmer to do so but but they can still get that point and change it to suit their own purposes another thing though that I do want to point out now that I've gone over these larger social Nerys is that the idea that children are kind of super cultural they're outside of culture they're closer to nature was actually a really important part of this you know children have not been enculturated in quite the same way that adults have and so if you give a laptop to a child they can perhaps leapfrog over some of the cultural assumptions that adults in their world might have and be innovative in a way that maybe that culture doesn't allow them to be so this would be of something I'm not saying this is correct in any way but I just kind of want to point out that that that thread there so how is this built into the laptop I have an example here and we certainly saw that it's picton of it as is very kind of team friendly object in the commercial just now so this laptop was built to be to look playful it had a playful appearance originally had a hand crank they found that that was only a prototype model they couldn't make it feasible in the national model so they have these little informative ears instead even the logo looks like that child that's very excited legs and arms flung a wild flood flung wide and excitement it shipped with a lot of games and engines so there was an encouragement of a particular kind of play that the founder that people involved with one that not those the founders thought would be especially appealing to kids so there's this kind of elision between all play that children do and computer video game play all of the software was open source and constructionists there was some back and forth early on the project about their continuity partnered with Microsoft and all of that there are a lot of kind of upheavals within the community around that but again it was all open source it also shipped with a mesh network so this is kind of prototype model showing you know all of these these are kids collaborating around a web browser these are kids collaborative paint application other web browser printers as far as I know this is a mock-up whenever I saw the mesh network attempting anyone that MTG semester network in a wild that more than life three machines they just took out mesh networking in later update software updates because these machines ended up just being too slow so they did have some really interesting features and these features a body many of the values of the culture and kind reflected these social imaginaries however these were very limited machines a lot of ways they came with one gigabyte hard drive not memory a hard drive it was flat harddrive which you know solid state that was pretty innovative at the time one gigabyte was not much even in 2005 50 or honey it did not come with a video player there's no way to play video as it was shipped in I think it didn't run flash either so is still very big it it did not have a music player had some music creation software that couldn't play music but I was sort of incidental the assumption was that kids in creating it did have a web browser did have a word processor for processing program it was built on Red Hat yeah Red Hat Linux and they made their own kind of custom windowing software on top of it called sure I was fine kind of using they said oh it's meant to be this kind of cheeky thing like parents don't want their kids to have sugar does that actually sings and and it was mint it was built in the bucket I mean it was a ruggedized laptop in fact never Conte and his talks would often close one fling it for 100 bucks break it but fling it across the stage and then open it up and turn him on and show it but it still works just fine however this did set up some problematic attack certifications that I'll get to a little bit okay so one thing I want to point out about some of the limitations of this machine especially it's it's one gigabyte hard one gigabyte hard drive of sorts all the state hard drive and it's very slow processor speed was that in many ways it was a throwback machine it was a throwback to the kinds of machines that people who made it maybe use in their youth or their childhood and in in as much in has sorry as such this reflected what I call nostalgic design so often in oil we see mailing lists various routes and we talk about the machines that they learn to program on the converse EC pours the entire ease whatever they might be and how those were inspiration what they were designing here and so within that model why would you need more than what can you bite harder and write like never have it that's that's an enormous amount for a 1980s computer so so I want to kind of point out some of the maybe the problems with a nostalgic clearly but also why nostalgia is so important so there's this wonderful book the way we never were about how nostalgia for a particular kind of American family continues to shape policy and our kind of social norms around what correct families are meant to be in the United States to this day right like the debates we hear about Family Values continue to kind of evoke this particular maybe nineteen when this is right that never really existed on a mass scale like maybe it existed here and there but there's a particular kind of nostalgia image likewise the nostalgia image of their own childhoods that these hackers drawn it called hackers as not in a can than breaking computer sense but in as a term that they themselves adopt that they adopted the de salta that they had was not something that was necessarily reflecting their actual childhoods didn't reflect the way they actually learned a program and the kinds of resources they had a drawn where they went for questions when they got stuck right it reflected this kind of Mythology of them encountering the computer falling in love with it and teaching themselves to program really it was all about them computer all right so I'm going to now move into how this project translated you know I always tend to take a little bit too long on this first part but I do feel like this laying the groundwork for why this project was charismatic it's a kind of important part of this story but now I want to talk a bit about how this project was translated in Paraguay what did children actually do with these EXO's in their free time how are they using the classrooms and what did these findings mean for you see clearly but also more broadly for design we did in the technology industry so there were going to be according to medical senator honey hundreds of millions of these machines out there within a couple years of his in reality about two and a half million machines are so low so it's much smaller makes two and a half of the machines is still a lot of machines and it turns out 85 percent of that were sold across Latin America they often targeted because the sort of heart of darkness problematic imaginary in early discussions but it turns out that Latin America had generally been capital a little bit more capital e for middle-income countries and a really interest in open source and really very well-developed open source communities a lot of flow between the u.s. and expat communities and local open source activists all across Latin America it's not that other regions don't have that that eighties time came together in a really interesting way that made oil EC resonate very strongly so we have a couple of really big projects the one that actually went one-to-one countrywide in a recently large country is Uruguay they have about a million laptops and Counting this project is actually still going Peru also has about a million but it had it's a much larger country because and the project there really followed negroponte day's advice to hand out the laptops and walk away there were some very well kind of recorded well-publicized events and handing out laptops inland remote mountaintop village is shaking hands kids with laptops and then the helicopter flew off and there was no follow-up in some of these villages there's no way to charge the laptops these were just located laptops despite the early talk of the hand-crank and so in Peru in a lot of places these laptops ended up locked in covers so that is I think an important story to tell and in fact we need to say Chan kind of an impact that furthering her own work but I was really interested in telling the story of a project that was said to be going well it said sometime in Uruguay but I ended up focusing it on Paraguay and they're interesting for a few reasons they were run by an NGO rather than of government so they weren't tied to the same kind of election cycles and vagaries with that that amenity that Uruguay and crew and others were tied to and they're a little bit more kind of agile and really trying to kind of make this work in fact they wanted me to take over afterwards so they put in a lot of work they put in a lot of work building out infrastructure with a lot of work socially training everybody so here we can see you know they're putting WiMAX towers with some donations from a local telecom the schools are repainted they were plugs and all the classrooms they had all sorts of publicity events and festivals for kids all sorts of things to try to kind of promote this project this is the I think the initial Paraguay Attica team there are a few of these people in sight without that in kind of I was there in 2010 and I just want to point out most of the people of all generations of twenties they were pretty young and they were very idealistic one other interesting thing about them was that almost all of them this picture shows a couple local people but almost everybody in this picture is actually from asunción the capital of Paraguay and they're from the other class so in fact the founder Raoul here talks about how he originally pitched the project in 2006 to his friends dad who just happen to be running way something you can kind of see the connections that these people have one group of people who ended up really taking or who's who a lot of responsibility was placed on for this project was a very different group of people Paraguay and teachers so Paraguay and teachers in 2010 at least were paid about half of what the federal minimum wage was from various kind of convolutions of the law they in many cases have second jobs or sometimes they taught it to schools there was a four-hour block in the morning a four-hour block no more than that afternoon so teachers might teach through student bodies in the day they were expected to do a certain number of hours of unpaid training every year which this one laptop per child training Mountain training and it relates to some of the conflicting divisions of development that we have so Paraguay I took that did put a lot of work into trying to make this project work but with in Paraguay this is also in the context of an education system that had been underfunded and undervalued for over 50 years and this goes back to on the dictatorship in every way that ended in 1989 but the same party the Colorado party continued to be in power up until 2008 and it's actually back to power now so within this kind of larger landscape we might question what a project like One Laptop Per child could do within this kind of larger infrastructure of devaluing education so I would have very briefly talked to some of the challenges that came up so they did install plugs in many of these countries but usually only one or two depending on this school and what by the time I arrived in 2010 the kids have had their laptops about a year and a half and so it keeps her wanted to try to use the laptops in their classroom they had to deal with charging the laptops various laptops discharged by the time I arrived in 2010 skip to their breakdown slide by the time err argentinos intent about 25 percent of computers had hardware problems some of them based on so sometimes screens would be blank motherboards would fail more often the chargers would go bad other kinds of things that you know maybe didn't render the computer completely inoperable but would make it very hard to use he's bored but in about 15% of the computers that he were rendered inoperable and in fact when I returned in 2013 I encountered just stacks and stacks of laptops in the main office one of Paraguay in Japan in a prepay unrepaired with no repair parts in sight and this this shaped a very early kind of imaginary around the laptop that it was a little toy but it didn't matter it was not something that he really used in the classroom it was not something that children were getting a lot of value out of and we saw a lot of non-use so in addition to the 50% our said 15% of laptops that were in operably broken and when I interviewed them they said they're frustrating to use I'd rather play soccer I'd rather play with my siblings I help my parents with their business I you know I have a number of other commitments that don't don't let me prioritize this one thing I just want to call attention to here is just kind of improving the narrative that these kids are somehow not actually created that they're not learners he just really didn't find anything interesting in this another 1/3 of the kids about 34% this is these are kind of rough numbers but based on all of my observations we're interested in centerpieces when you think about this and maybe how you use your own laptops this is maybe not a huge surprise right like we think about if you have maybe a younger sibling or other kids in your life you might think about what they are interested in doing with machines right maybe play some video games maybe you do some kind of maybe listen to music and these things were no exception this is what it was most happenings for them and in fact they had to go through some kind of complicated convolutions to make this possible sometimes David installed several renewing environment that had a media player video player and maybe an install you know he packages that people would put together for the back so and I found the way that this kind of knowledge disseminated within schools really fascinating in a way this was this was interesting kind of technical even if it wasn't the kind of programming learning that well BC kind of originally imagined however I do want to just question who had who had the power to kind of direct this right so one of the games that I was there is 2010 it was very popular it's called Vasco de Bosco let is Ana Nestle character box Colette is kind of Popeye like character but instead of eating spinach pasta Colette drinks milk to get strong so they made a couple side-scrolling games where possible run along and have to jump over baddies and drink chocolate milk to power up so here's this clear Capra Tyson right I think this is this is a game but in this corporate advertise and there are a number of things along these lines that were kind of thinly veiled advertisements that were marketed to these kids through this device meant to be educational so so in that way I want to caution against projects like this and the kinds of influences that they enable for kids I just always wanted to question who actually has power one gate one thing I found particularly amusing do was supported to the echo much to parents children and I do want to just come back around to talking about I have these we're learning machines for anybody what that looked like so these programming language is appropriate environment education just scratch they shipped with something turtle blocks which is just kind of a riff on kind of mashup of scratch and the older logo style of text based programming where you'd still be moving a turtle so that part of see there's right here and I did I really looked pretty hard for kids who were using these kinds of programs of all I didn't find a few and I followed up with them and I found a few interesting things one was that their caretakers often their mothers sometimes an aunt sometimes other people encourage creativity they said oh you have that new device don't use it like a DD this was some households and this is a sort of problematic coin I don't want to say there's any kind of a determinism of like wealthier households to be more entertaining than that but I think in a lot of cases they have no computer at home already it's they haven't had an idea of what computers could do and what may be interesting to do on a computer the kidneys are not so predictive and I also want to emphasize that these might have been learning machines to a point but they were still media machines and overall I've you know like the story of translating prisoner that One Laptop Per child told about how this noodle is meant to affect the world really miss the social component this is how learning is culturally situated is socially motivated this is something that I think education researchers and certainly common researchers will take for granted this is kind of akin to pretty basic kind of findings within the field but within the technology world it's very easy to just think about maybe the child in the computer or maybe computer mediated highly individualistic visions for what technology should in the world and for his for the fact that kids will believe me motivated to use this if their social worlds motivate them in some way I also just want to call out a catch-22 sort of krishna of One Laptop Per child and a lot of these other projects so One Laptop Per child really haven't promised in and in a lot of ways they had to because that's how you get that tension in this world right you can imagine pitching a project to venture capitalist you have to promise that you're going to revolutionize whatever it is that relations right but you're setting yourself up for a very difficult situation on the road either you're going to happen they get to take this revolution when you're going to have to admit that oh well maybe I've had some incremental benefits but I haven't had the revolutionary change that I promised it and either way one laptop per child likewise did not have long-term funding when I returned in 2013 the crew had been cut down to a skeleton crew and there's no support in schools anymore or for teachers to incorporate it into the curriculum so I think this is this is we sue some of the limits of Krishna and I think there's a time see this last anecdote and just go to what we can learn from the crystal machine there's a lot of value in Christmas they provides your mission and purpose smooths away in certainties it makes progress seem inevitable around resources or these projects but there are some consequences stupid 22 project funding has been promised big but if there's the short term there's traps like nostalgic design you can fall into where you might design for mythologize past rather than in the present and we can kind of see how these social imaginaries may recur in other projects so we talked about childhood schools computer use these all have a kind of element of technological determinism that the race user agency one thing I really try to do in the book is to bring the agency of the children and the communities using these laptops and actually for some other projects that kind of echo some of these same types of charisma logo certainly OLPC scratch and have labs the maker movement some of the kind of often technical tooling movements that occurred we tech any target schools fall into this and of course we put out a more copy right link there are so many stories or so we can have either build dreams and it's not that we have to erase them but we have to recognize them and harness them in a way that can maybe produce lasting social change [Applause] I'm happy to tipsy questions oh boy I understand I know some of you scooted out already for five o'clock commitments

Channel: Design Lab

Views: 1,121

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Keywords: talk, ucsd, design, technology, design at large, design @ large, D@L, Design@Large, Designer, Design Lab, Design lab at UCSD, UC San Diego, Research, University of California, design research, education, college, university, student, learn, school, speaker, design trends, TED, design thinking, Tech, Coding, Cognitive science, future, ai, product design, one laptop per child, MIT, MIT Media lab, OLPC, berkeley, equality, XO-1, Nicholas Negroponte, Laptop, computer, ram, cheap laptop, review

Id: ZH13bVUfNuk

Length: 49min 56sec (2996 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019