The Child And The Machine

Drawing from hundreds of school visits, studies, and expert interviews, the authors have concluded that the rush to use computers in schools has led to one of the most expensive and least helpful revolutions in the history of American education, robbing children of education in music and the arts.

Eleven year old Olly has a very special delivery - a 3D printing machine, stamped with PROPERTY OF M.O.D and BRITISH SPACE AGENCY. WARNING. DO NOT TAMPER, which has magical powers... It has a name, it speaks, and it can print ANYTHING Olly asks it to - the coolest new toy, a room full of chocolate cake - but what Olly really wants is... his dad.

In his classsic book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert set out a vision of how computers could change school. In The Children's Machine he now looks back over a decade during which American schools acquired more than three million computers and assesses progress and resistance to progress.

From educators to parents, everyone seems to be clamouring for state-of-the-art school computers in the pervasive belief that computer literacy provides children with a competitive edge in the professional and business world. But where is the evidence that computer use improves basic skills like reading, writing, and comprehension? The Child and the Machine is the first book of our time to challenge, credibly and rigorously, our obsession with a technology that, the authors contend, is wreaking havoc with our children`s lives. Drawing on hundreds of studies from North America, Europe and Japan, as well as first-hand accounts of classrooms across North America, the authors paint a sobering picture of the ineffectiveness of computers, and their negative effects on children`s educational development. Fortunately, The Child and the Machine also offers recommendations for correcting what the authors see as a potentially disastrous situation. Controversial and compelling, The Child and the Machine is bound to spark heated and prolonged debate among all those who care about education. The Child and the Machine won Book of the Year Award from Foreward Magazine (an American publishers magazine for the small presses) in the Education category. (1998)

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains 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 captivated 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 fifty years of history and 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 children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Papert assesses adoption of technology by schools and resistance to progress.