I recently read an interesting, critical article looking at the One Laptop Per Child program and its assumptions about computers and learning. Coauthors Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames argue that the program's original vision of parachuting laptops into the Third World was vastly over-optimistic, for both mundane reasons (the OLPC laptop is not that great a piece of technology), and subtler ones. Their critical argument is that the project's Achilles Heel has been its single-minded focus on the laptop itself, and Negroponte's insistence that OLPC machines don't require teacher training or tech support. Kids, he argues, will learn on their own, teach each other, and parents and teachers– many of whom are poorly-educated and -motivated, have institutional reasons for opposing technology in the classroom– are much more likely to be impediments than supports.

In contrast, Warschauer and Ames argue that the successful deployment of information technologies in the classroom– and more broadly, in the lives of kids– requires more than just self-directed learning. Indeed, self-direction doesn't exist in a social vacuum: the OLCP machines don't just glom onto the limbic regions of a kid's brain, and start pumping dopamine whenever the kids write lines of Lego code. Instead, they argue,

it is not the computer itself that brings benefit, but rather the social and technical support that surrounds the computer that makes the difference…. [S]tudents who already have strong language and literacy skills, as well as background knowl- edge on topics at hand, benefit most from unstructured learning environments. In contrast, students with weak language or literacy skills or insufficient background knowledge often find the cognitive load of these environments overwhelming and thus learn less from them. These two unacknowledged factors represent a flaw in the one-sided belief in self-directed constructionism.

Elsewhere, Ames looks more closely at the assumptions Negroponte and other OLPC cofounders make about the nature of learning and computers.

In my research I found that both the laptop’s design and Constructionist learning theory drew heavily on the project leaders’ personal experiences, which they optimistically mapped onto millions of children around the world. Specifically, the design of this laptop and its software was strongly influenced by the stories its founders and leaders tell about their own childhood experiences with computers. Most of these stories follow a familiar form: a young child – usually a white, middle-class boy – is given access to a computer, teaches himself all of its intricacies over many hours of open-ended exploration, and he grows up to be a talented programmer. This is the model behind all of the books and articles about children and computers by Negroponte and his collaborator Seymour Papert, who developed Constructionist learning theory and strongly influenced the early directions of OLPC. These *do* seem like perfectly reasonable assumptions to make, given our focus on individual success in the United States. This kind of story is *incredibly* common in the tech world, after all. But it’s not how the world actually works.

In reality,

these talented programmers’ fathers were often computer or electrical engineers. They had computer magazines at home. They had people they could talk to about computers. They often had a home environment that primed them for learning instead of passive consumption. It’s telling that these kids were on the computer, back when the computer was much more limited than it is today, instead of watching TV like so many of their peers. And I find it fascinating that the social support that this environment no doubt provided is so often discounted or entirely ignored. These hackers are mythologizing their own childhoods based on the overly individual-focused worlds they live in, and now they’re using those myths to promote an overly individualistic alternative to traditional education around the world.

She concludes,

I want to… caution against making education an individual experience where everybody (in theory) has all the tools they need to succeed. This unfairly shifts the burden of failure from the “system” – a flawed educational model, a corrupt government, an unjust economic structure – to the individual. If they don’t succeed now, it’s their own fault. But these problems are too big for this individualism and techno-utopianism to solve alone.

I need to give some thought to how these kinds of self-images of programmers affect the design of more everyday systems and products, and the degree to which computers reflect ideas about solitude or individual learning. I think I'm right that lots of current systems over-emphasize collaboration as a wellspring of innovation and creative thought, but Ames' work points to an earlier ideal about self-reliant, self-educating programmers that is probably still rattling around in our world.