[Book Review]: The Charisma Machine by Morgan G.Ames

The Charisma Machine is more than a decade-long work, deeply field-researched and studied ethnographic work by Morgan G. Ames, on the life, death, and legacy of the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC). The OLPC is a "non-profit" project that promised a "revolution" in education by providing a cheap 100-dollar-laptop to each kid and integrating it to their everyday schooling in order "for children to learn with, and from, computers". The creators of the project believed that by giving children the chance to tinker with this laptop by themselves, connecting with each other wirelessly, reading the source code of each program if they want to, kids will naturally learn how to program. That -according to project leaders- will improve their education and hence their social lives and those around them in the future. OLPC produced more than a million laptops, delivered over all the world, from Uruguay to Paraguay, to India to Rwanda....etc.

The author examines this project along the span of its lifetime from 2005 to 2014, specifically in Paraguay , where she visited and stayed in those schools and observed how the teachers and kids interact and use these laptops. She even examines what social and educational impact on the kids the laptop had long after the project ended. In a nutshell, the laptop was too frustrating to use (as every computer is), it hijacked the lesson time with technical difficulties, distracted students, and most of its use was for media-consumption, video-games and passing movies and files to one another. And even the ones who were curious about it and wanted to learn how to program (few as they were) could not improve their social lives because of existing structural inequalities -gender, language, social class, and more- and sometimes the project worsened those inequalities unknowingly.

The book criticizes the project and its creators for relating kids experience with a laptop with their rose-tinted memoires of their first encounter with a computer in the seventies and eighties, where it was mostly only priviliged families who had access to a computer, and when it was a command-line world, what Morgan Ames calls "Nostalgic and Charismatic design". In other words, they assumed, uncritically, that their experience with the laptop is universal and could be applied successfully to any kid around the world.

In conclusion, and as the author stated "This is thus more than just an account of One Laptop per Child. It is a cautionary tale about technology hype". "Away from the technological utopianism that proports for technology-enabled social change, showy but myopic projects, and techno-fixes that claim to have found the best methods to 'reinvent' education", Morgan G. Ames suggests, based on the work of other educational historian, that a "tremendous amount of work-social, infrastructural, and ideological- [is] needed to produce even incremental social change."

I was myself a victim of this overpromising technology hypes that claimed to revolutionize education, and I was in some instances pushing for it. Like the MOOCs project and how it promised to almost replace University by its promotion for directed self online learning. Another example is the Foldscope, where it promised it will change Science education in the third-world by its hand-held "telescope", for which I bought several and distributed them foolishly thinking it will have a huge impact on whom he/she uses it. What I really learned from this book is that education is a profoundly social process, a result of the interaction between students, teachers, family and society as whole. Ignoring this established fact in favor of fostering a relationship between the student and the machine (as theses technology-hyped projects do), will risk a failure for these projects to create a socially and institutionally supported environment of learning.

A highly recommended book to read for anyone who creates, studies, or works with technology in order not to be blinded by the buzz and hype that surrounds new technologies (especially charismatic ones) that claims to solve social issues.