Acronym used for Information and Communication Technologies for Development. Also known as ICT4D; it indicates both the practices and experiences of using ICT, that is computers and similar technologies, for development purposes, that is improving people’s lives at different levels; as well as the study and analysis of such practices and experiences, from a professional and academic research perspective.
Published in Chapter:
Technological Illusions and Educational Resistances: The Public Discourse about OLPC in Peru and Its Policy Failure
Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru)
Copyright: © 2016
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8740-0.ch025
Abstract
OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child initiative, was accepted by just a few countries, including Peru. The largest acquisition of computers has produced a fairly low impact in education and is now being quietly phased-out. Peru's government decision to adopt the computers, back in 2007, was not contested or questioned by the political class, the media or even teachers, with just a rather small number of specialists arguing against it. This chapters discussed the political and argumentative processes that brought OLPC into the public sphere, through the use of a specific narrative, that of hackerism, i.e., the hacker attitude towards computers, and how social and political validation resulted in adoption. An assessment of the process of framing OLPC as a hacker product and the perils of such reasoning lead to discuss the need for a counter-narrative about the role of computers in society.