From MIT to Paraguay : a critical historical and ethnographic analysis of one laptop per child
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) represents one of the largest experiments in laptop-driven learning currently underway. Since its founding in 2005, OLPC has been promoting their custom-designed green and white "XO" laptops as a solution for learning and economic growth in the developing world. About two and a half million of these laptops are in use -- 85% of them in Latin America -- and the project has inspired other initiatives in both education and low-cost computing. The XO has become a focal point for diverse and sometimes contradictory discourses about children, technology, education, and development, bringing unlikely groups into conversation around this charismatic object. OLPC and the educational philosophy that inspired it, constructionism, both hailing from the MIT Media Lab, frame themselves as a radical break from unchanging educational tradition. I first explore what the laptops developers intended it to do through a reading of literature about the laptop and the features of the laptop itself. I then compare these intentions with what the laptop is actually doing in a small but well-supported project of 9000 laptops in Paraguay, based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork. In the process, I examine the role that a utopian framing plays in evangelizing OLPC and in making the XO laptop a charismatic object on one hand, and limiting its integration into the messy realities of day-to-day use on the other. In closely examining the ideas built into OLPC's laptops and the ways in which children actually use the machines, my research sheds light on the complicated and often contentious debate over the symbolic and actual role of technology in childhood, education, and development.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Ames, Morgan Golata |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Communication. |
| Primary advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Thesis advisor | Bailenson, Jeremy |
| Thesis advisor | Luhrmann, T. M. (Tanya M.), 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Nass, Clifford Ivar |
| Thesis advisor | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
| Advisor | Bailenson, Jeremy |
| Advisor | Luhrmann, T. M. (Tanya M.), 1959- |
| Advisor | Nass, Clifford Ivar |
| Advisor | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Morgan Golata Ames. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Communication. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2013. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Morgan Golata Ames
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