Teaching CS Humbly, and Watching the AI Revolution

The Charisma Machine 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 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.