Page 149 - Education in a Digital World

136 ‘One Laptop per Child’

Yet despite these issues of price and penetration, OLPC remains a beacon project
for many educational and technological commentators – seen to offer clear proof
that digital technology can be an integral element of a transformative agenda in the
field of international development. As de Bastion and Rolf (2008, p.31) conclude
with regard to the continued rollout of the XO machines in sub-Saharan Africa:

As an integral part of a robust overall strategy, it is indeed correct to give
children in Ethiopia a laptop … It may seem ironic to distribute emergency
aid and computers at the same time, but it is one way of breaking the endless
cycle of dependency. The true madness would be to underestimate the lasting
value of the learning which ICT4D can additionally deliver.

Unpacking the Values of the OLPC Programme

As this brief overview of its progress suggests, OLPC is certainly not a straightfor-
ward technology production and distribution programme. Indeed, in terms of our
theoretical focus on the ‘social shaping’ of technology outlined in Chapter 2, the
OLPC initiative is better understood as being driven at all stages of its development
by a complex set of interests, values and guiding agendas. As such, the idea of put-
ting an XO laptop in the hands of every child in the world clearly has been – and
continues to be – informed by a set of accompanying ideological interests and
agendas. In this respect, OLPC is no different from all of the other examples of
educational technology considered up until this point in the book.
The notion of educational technology as an ideologically driven process is
not lost on those involved in the OLPC initiative. As Nicholas Negroponte has
himself reasoned, “we’re not building an empire, we’re building a movement”
(Negroponte, cited in Hamm and Smith 2008). Thus as Ananny and Winters
(2007, p.107) continue:

We suggest that this and other ICT4D projects be critiqued not only in terms
of their technological feasibility, economic rationales or models of education
but, more fundamentally, in terms of the ideologies they intend their users
to enact. [Even] the OLPC’s interface guidelines … serve – intentionally or
otherwise – as powerful signals to policy makers, cultural critics and
local communities of the particular ideologies intended to be enacted by the
XO’s users.

In this manner, we now need to move beyond our initial descriptions of the OLPC
as a set of artefacts (e.g. the XO devices and their software designs) and as a set
of practices (e.g. the design decisions of OLPC, its partnering organisations and
community of open-source developers). Instead, we now need to consider the
OLPC initiative as embodying a set of values, and approach the XO laptops as “sites
in which designers, users, policy-makers and evangelists of all stripes perform