The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

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Drawing from her forthcoming book, The Charisma Machine, Morgan G. Ames will chronicle the life

and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explain why -- despite its failures -- the same

utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to "disrupt"

education and development.

Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child

promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap

laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways, starting

with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who

were enchanted by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind

its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a

fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should

play in learning.

Drawing on a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the

laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for

"technically precocious boys" -- idealized younger versions of the developers themselves -- rather

than the diverse range of children who might actually use them. Reaching fifty years into the past

and across the globe, this talk will offer a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype

and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.