Some thoughts on the word "Laptop"
Hello, A few days ago, Michael Tobis brought up the New York Times article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" [1] on the OLPC Chicago mailing list. Scott Van Den Plas then responded to it with the question, "How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply placing laptops into a traditional setting?" [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html I responded to his question on the OLPC mailing list and Michael thought it might be useful for me to post it here. On 5/8/07, Scott Van Den Plas <scottv@gmail.com> wrote:
How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply placing laptops into a traditional setting?
Well, I imagine it's too late to change the name of the program, but to be honest the very name "one laptop per child" made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. I think it's because of the connotations that the word "laptop" brings: it's something that, 10 years ago, was a yuppie status symbol, and I think that's significant. Imagine how ridiculous a program like "one cell phone per child" sounds--even if you try to emphasize that a cell phone can actually be incredibly useful for communication, especially for societies that don't even have land-line telephones, the fact is that the first thing that pops into people's heads (well, my head at least) when they hear the word "cell phone" is a Samsung advertisement about some new feature-loaded monstrosity that comes with downloadable ringtones. The word "laptop" comes with almost as much negative cultural baggage as "cell phone". When most people see the word "laptop", I'm guessing they usually think of Norton AntiVirus, Ad-Aware, Microsoft Office, porn, and Google. Only one or two of those is generally regarded as a really useful thing. And when the word "laptop" and "child" are put in the same sentence, all I can think of is MySpace and Alge-Blaster, which are things no nation should spend millions of dollars on. On the other hand, I *love* the term "Children's Machine", which is what the OLPC laptop was originally called. A "machine" is what I had when I grew up: it didn't help me with school in any direct way, it didn't serve as a replacement for a good textbook or a great teacher, but it served an entirely different purpose: it was my personal little lab where I could create things and tinker with the things others had created. Social scientists call it "Bricolage" or "Constructivism", and whatever it is, it's something that I wish every child in the world had some opportunity to experience. So the word "Children's Machine" brings back memories of what I had when I was growing up: it wasn't portable like a laptop, but it served many of the same goals, I think, that OLPC is aiming for. So I guess my two cents to OLPC are: drop the word "laptop". And especially don't call it "One Laptop Per Child", because that phrase alone is going to throw dozens of assumptions into people's heads and they're just going to laugh at you, like I once did. - Atul
Atul Varma wrote:
Well, I imagine it's too late to change the name of the program, but to be honest the very name "one laptop per child" made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. I think it's because of the connotations that the word "laptop" brings: it's something that, 10 years ago, was a yuppie status symbol, and I think that's significant.
The word "laptop" comes with almost as much negative cultural baggage as "cell phone".
On the other hand, I *love* the term "Children's Machine", which is what the OLPC laptop was originally called. A "machine" is what I had when I grew up:
So the word "Children's Machine" brings back memories of what I had when I was growing up: it wasn't portable like a laptop, but it served many of the same goals, I think, that OLPC is aiming for.
The problem is that ones associations with a word depend, to some degree, on other things in your life. "Laptop" was probably chosen because of the connotations of "personal", "portable", "useful/practical" and "self-powered". I don't associate "laptop" with "yuppie", perhaps because I didn't develop a negative association with that word but first saw them carried by engineers/programmers and only later by business folk. A laptop was something that I as a kid wanted, but couldn't afford, personal, as in I didn't have to share with schoolmates or siblings. Mine. And for you "machine" has a positive meaning, as for me an engineer, but for some it means "dehumanizing", "rigid/inflexible", "noisy", "bulky". Definitely not something for children, unless you view them as resources to be processed mechanically, an offensive idea to most.
From my reading of your post, it sounds like you are referring to what in my childhood would be the explorations with tinker toys, erector sets, lego blocks, lincoln logs -- an open-ended set of pieces with which to tinker and explore. But to those people who don't understand the attraction, who lacked such things growing up, those remain just toys for a child's distraction and amusement, not something educational. Now we as geeks know the power of such constructivism, but many do not, perhaps intentionally due to its subversive nature.
OLPC walks the narrow line between being pragmatic and having the appearance of irrelevance while carefully hiding its dangerous, subversive nature. It will succeed as long as it keeps one eye on the amplification of children, rather than that of teachers, administrators or governments. -Jeff
I'll jump in to again tout CP4E as an "alive and thriving" acronym (or abbreviation) that escapes some of the OLPC spin, and that's a good thing. Diversity matters. Firstly, we escape "for children" and instead have "for everyone" or "for everybody" which sounds more egalitarian and less into inter-generational warfare, excluding adults, which in developing areas are as unlikely to have laptops as the kids. Secondly, we focus on an activity rather than a shape and/or size of computer, by emphasizing "programming" -- an activity which all these boxes require and support. Ever since OSCON 2005 I think it was, with the Gibson Guitar bus outside, Gibson a sponsor, I've been thinking of portable computers as musical instruments we carry around, like guitars in a lot of ways. Geek = Musician has a kind of pleasing set of connotations. The idea being: if you get into it more than superficially, you get into programming somehow, no ifs ands or buts about it. Now I'm not suggesting we help those anxious to paint laptops in a bad light, because they feel threatened by OLPC. I support OLPC and continue to push it, welcome it. But CP4E is different, both in approach and philosophy, is home grown within Python Nation (by Guido), has ongoing manifestations. So I'm not planning to drop CP4E *in place of* OLPC just as surely. They're not the same. Frankly, I think OLPC will get by without a lot of help from the Python community, in terms of just getting the hardware spread around. It's what goes on with those laptops once "in situ" that Python comes in. What will the students actually *do* with these machines? Will they learn to program them? Or will they be left essentially without direction, left to tackle a tired pre- computer curriculum that was never crafted with DynaBooks in mind (ala the Empire State model, a sorry affair I'm glad is unreflective of my own personal experience). Kirby
On 5/11/07, Jeff Rush <jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
The problem is that ones associations with a word depend, to some degree, on other things in your life. "Laptop" was probably chosen because of the connotations of "personal", "portable", "useful/practical" and "self-powered". I don't associate "laptop" with "yuppie", perhaps because I didn't develop a negative association with that word but first saw them carried by engineers/programmers and only later by business folk. A laptop was something that I as a kid wanted, but couldn't afford, personal, as in I didn't have to share with schoolmates or siblings. Mine.
That's interesting, and understandable.
And for you "machine" has a positive meaning, as for me an engineer, but for some it means "dehumanizing", "rigid/inflexible", "noisy", "bulky". Definitely not something for children, unless you view them as resources to be processed mechanically, an offensive idea to most.
Also understandable. Although I believe that what attracts me most to the term "Children's Machine" is actually the juxtaposition of the two words: taken by itself, "machine" does tend to mean "dehumanizing" to me, but when the word "children's" is put before it--a term that is anything *but* dehumanizing--the phrase takes on an entirely different meaning. But as you said, a lot of this just has to do with everyone's individual perceptions. I get the impression that regardless of what word OLPC uses, it's going to be a loaded term for everyone that conjures up vastly different visions depending on each individual person's backgrounds and beliefs. Which is unfortunate in one sense, but on the other hand it seems to imply that "laptop" is as good a word as any other.
From my reading of your post, it sounds like you are referring to what in my childhood would be the explorations with tinker toys, erector sets, lego blocks, lincoln logs -- an open-ended set of pieces with which to tinker and explore. But to those people who don't understand the attraction, who lacked such things growing up, those remain just toys for a child's distraction and amusement, not something educational. Now we as geeks know the power of such constructivism, but many do not, perhaps intentionally due to its subversive nature.
OLPC walks the narrow line between being pragmatic and having the appearance of irrelevance while carefully hiding its dangerous, subversive nature. It will succeed as long as it keeps one eye on the amplification of children, rather than that of teachers, administrators or governments.
This is where I think my understanding of the aims of the OLPC project start to break down. What is the "dangerous" and "subversive" nature of OLPC, or of using laptops as constructivist tools? When I was a child, I never considered myself to be a dangerous or subversive person, and I never thought of computers as such either; at most, they were another means of learning and playing that (to my disappointment) my school didn't happen to embrace. If I were to teach a child Python today, I wouldn't think of myself as being dangerous or subversive, but rather just introducing them to a passion of mine, one that I hope they may find as fulfilling as I do. What is the OLPC program trying to subvert? And why is it dangerous? While it probably sounds incredibly naive of me, it strikes me that the amplification of children should actually be the goal of teachers, administrators, and governments, and that helping the latter should naturally benefit the former. If we assume that teachers, administrators, and governments are too ignorant to understand the power of the constructivist mindset, yet we still try to peddle constructivist tools to them in the guise of pragmatism, then it's understandable that people have misperceptions about the goals of the OLPC program, because the OLPC program is being unclear (and deceptive) about them in the first place. In other words, shouldn't the goal be to convince teachers, administrators, and goverments that constructivism is a good thing, rather than telling them that they need laptops so their country can produce the next Jobs or Gates? Or am I misinterpreting something here? - Atul
In other words, shouldn't the goal be to convince teachers, administrators, and goverments that constructivism is a good thing, rather than telling them that they need laptops so their country can produce the next Jobs or Gates? Or am I misinterpreting something here?
- Atul
Hey Atul -- You ask some very fine questions, very topical. I think the paragraph above is revealing of your perspective and shows you are highly educated. You think this is about demonstrating to the world the value of "constructivism", an approach to pedagogy championed by many in the OLPC movement. And I'm not saying you're wrong. In this telling, the laptops are the avatars of a philosophy which combats rendering students passive, mere vessels for knowledge, and suggests rather that each has an existential responsibility for constructing a working model of reality -- so best get to work, as this may prove an arduous job. Constructivism makes room for the doctrine called "question authority" i.e. it has this troubling groundrule: you can't assume anyone around you has the better model e.g. maybe "the adults" got it wrong. That, in itself, is a troublesome attitude in many societies, including the American one at the turn of the last century, if we're to believe Bucky Fuller's account in which a "darling, never mind what you're thinking, we're trying to *teach* you" attitude prevailed among the all-knowing adults (who proved to be wrong, again and again, about matters of some consequence). However, in the minds of many, including some government officials, the arguments among the various philosophies of education are considered insufferably academic. What's really subversive about the Internet is it puts out tools that level the playing field in many ways, between insiders and outsiders, when it comes to matters of accessing an international database of media sources (only a top elite used have that level of access, making it easy to censor, to control the syllabus). For one reason or another (depends on the scenario), the idea of a local population becoming highly informed, higly computer literate, can feel threatening. All those school children are going to realize X about Y. Fill in the blanks. Makes 'em feel queasy. At the very least, we should admit that the Internet traffics in many alternative models of "what makes it all tick" [quick scroll of conspiracy theories] and teachers find it distracting to have to compete with so many alternatives at every turn (not because they're censorious by nature but because lots of arguments and back talk may mean one's own model will languish, neglected -- kids won't even bother to tune in some of their own best heritage, if persuaded by foreign media that "Hollywood knows best" or some other such dubious thesis). The Internet has the potential to flood a quiet way of life, balanced with an ecosystem, with endless noise, subversive simply in the sense of highly distracting. In a generation, the kids have forgotten which plants are poisonous and it's downhill from there. Anyway, let me change it around a little and put it this way: we don't like to see the minds of young children subverted and rendered prematurely ugly by dint of unfortunate sequencing. Why should we deprive them of their innocence? That being said, it's so open to question what I'm even talking about. Am I talking about porn? And that's just the thing. We're talking about multiple namespaces (a Pythonic concept). In some households, "porn" is not what's so threatening, whereas in other households it may have apocalyptic significance. BTW, I wonder if you noticed the 2nd link into Scheme World in my previous post linked to subverting imagery... Kirby
participants (3)
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Atul Varma -
Jeff Rush -
kirby urner