Joseph Nuthalapati (@work) @njoseph_1@toot.thoughtworks.com

I just read "The Charisma Machine", a postmortem anthropological field study about the one laptop per child program. The book hit home.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/charisma-machine

**That is definitely a must-read if you feel ideologically tightly bound to free software and/or the constructionism learning theory**. It's a painful albeit necessary read.

The book starts by documenting the project's inception at the MIT media lab and linking it to the wider constructionism ideology. The OLPC project's main goal is to distribute a laptop per child to third-world countries. The laptop is expected to act as a trojan horse, pushing children to learn how to program/creative endeavor home in spite of an "outdated and primitive school system". The idea is the charisma alone of the laptop's hardware would lead children to creatively explore the device without any educational help.

The second part of the book actually documents the most "successful" deployment in Paraguay through the NGO Educa Paraguay. It highlights the social and infrastructure-based shortcomings of the deployment that lead to this project being a total failure. Not only the children did not experience the expected charisma of the machine, but the school and teachers/educa educators became the project's biggest allies.

The last part show how despite this obvious failure, OLPC and Educa managed to massage the reality to make it fit the constructionism promises and make look the project like an overall success.

This summary is of course an over-simplification of the 200 pages book, you should read the whole thing.

As always with Mit press, it's impossible to get a hold of a decently priced paperback copy of the book outside of northern America. You can find the epub on zlib ;) https://fr.fr1lib.org/book/11635102/8f85b9

"There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the United States, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia. An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5 percent of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries."

The #JoinFediverseWiki is now available in 3 languages

#English
#German
#Japanese

https://joinfediverse.wiki/

Feel free to help translate it into different languages. Here is how:

https://joinfediverse.wiki/Meta:Pages_in_other_languages

You must wear a face!!

Remembering Aaron Swartz, who died on this day, a victim of the copyright system https://walledculture.org/remembering-aaron-swartz-who-died-on-this-day-a-victim-of-the-copyright-system/

By @glynmoody

Aaron's face gets thrown around the internet to prop up campaigns and etc, but it's important to remember that Aaron was an activist for digital rights, and was bullied into suicide by a system that wanted to punish him for his activism. He was also a human being with friends and family who loved him dearly.

Very good #Tusky news: I just merged the pull request I was working on for the last months
👉 Complete refactoring of the timeline loading logic (which is basically the heart of the app) with Kotlin & coroutines
👉 Squashed some bugs within the timeline
👉 Code is now way cleaner than before, which should make adding new features faster and bugs easier to spot
#tuskydev

Republished from: https://twitter.com/hourlyFox/status/1480419144684257283

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