Laptops Alone Can't Bridge the Digital Divide by Morgan Ames
Morgan Ames wrote "Laptops Alone Can't Bridge the Digital Divide by Morgan Ames" for The Technology Review on how the failures of One Laptop per Child have much to teach us about fixing educational inequities. Morgan's book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, the 2020 Sally Hacker Prize, and the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize, draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project - and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals.
From the article:
In May 2020, two months after covid-19 shut down schools and public life around the world, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was giving $10 million to California’s Oakland Unified School District to purchase 25,000 Chromebooks. Dorsey tweeted that his donation was intended “to give EVERY single child in Oakland access to a laptop and internet in their homes.” The donation came just a day after Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf announced the #OaklandUndivided campaign to raise $12.5 million to “close the digital divide for good” in the city.
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