Page 155 - Education in a Digital World

142 ‘One Laptop per Child’

computers is educationally better than giving them books, hiring more tea-
chers or building more schools – or even paying families to send their kids to
school. For Papert – and his MIT colleagues – technology seems to be the
answer, no matter what the question.

There are, therefore, clear divisions between the OLPC programme and the edu-
cational systems that they seek to initially work within but ultimately intend to then
work around. In particular, it could be argued that the OLPC initiative suffers from
a conceptual tension in viewing individual children as the principal sites of change
while also using the principal mechanism of change as the networked structures of
national school systems (Ananny and Winters 2007). Indeed, the deliberately pro-
vocative strategy of giving laptops to individual children and young people has
prompted considerable unease amongst those with vested interests in the continua-
tion of formal educational institutions. As the General Secretary of the Peruvian
Unified Union of Education Workers was reported to argue, “these laptops are not
part of a comprehensive educational, pedagogical project, and their usefulness is
debatable” (Luis Muñoz Alvarado, cited in Hamm and Smith 2008).
From all these points of view, the ambition of OLPC to import (and many would
argue impose) a homogeneous set of ‘other’ principles and values into a diverse range
of countries and contexts around the world has raised concerns over the programme’s
cultural insensitivity and neo-colonialist approach. As William Easterly reasoned
bluntly, “it’s arrogant of them. You cannot just stampede into a country’s education
system and say ‘Here’s the way to do it’” (cited in Hamm and Smith 2008). For some
critics, then, the OLPC programme is redolent of earlier colonialist interventions into
the regions of South America and sub-Saharan Africa. As technologist Guido van
Possum has argued, “I have thought for a while that sending laptops to developing
countries is simply the twenty-first-century equivalent of sending Bibles to the
colonies” (cited in Brabazon 2010). While extreme, these criticisms are reflected in
practical aspects of XO use in local contexts – in particular the OLPC model of
open-source development of diverse ‘local’ content. As Linda Smith Tabb observes:

Since most of the translators for the project are volunteers, it seems improbable
that all of the various languages will be able to be used for the XO laptops.
This is a concern even in countries such as Haiti – where Kreyol Aiysyen
co-exists with French – and the Andes of Peru – where Quechua co-exists
with Spanish – where linguistic recolonisation is at risk if laptops do not
enable use of either language. In these cases, the Green Machine does not so
much threaten Americanization, but cultural absorption by polities of larger
scale in closer proximity.
(Tabb 2008, p.347)

One final criticism is a misplaced confidence in the ability of a global technology-
project such as the OLPC to be free from political influence and interference while