{"id":2991,"date":"2014-09-08T03:39:21","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T03:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/?page_id=2991"},"modified":"2016-03-10T08:19:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T08:19:00","slug":"beyond-technological-fundamentalism-peruvian-hack-labs-and-inter-technological-education","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-5-shared-machine-shops\/peer-reviewed-articles\/beyond-technological-fundamentalism-peruvian-hack-labs-and-inter-technological-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Technological Fundamentalism: Peruvian Hack Labs & \u201cInter-technological\u201d Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anita Say Chan<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Sugarcamp<\/a><\/p>\n
Sugarcamp Hackathon organized by Escuelab hack lab in Lima, Peru. November 2011.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Introduction<\/span><\/h2>\n

Standing atop a high stage at the Interactive Technology Camp in Lima, public school teacher Eleazar Mamani Pacho flips through several slides featuring the rural elementary school where he works as principal and teacher. The images introduce the Aymara students and indigenous community in the Andean village of Lacachi where he teaches among to his audience, a mixed crowd of elite international policy makers, global education experts, and urban corporate representatives of IT firms sponsoring the education-oriented event \u2013 from Microsoft, to Intel and Telef\u00f3nica. Organized in 2012 by Peru\u2019s Ministry of Education in collaboration with the World Bank and US Embassy at the University of Lima, the two-day event drew over 1000 participants to Peru\u2019s capital city to hear presentations on the latest innovations in educational technologies from a range of stakeholders, institutional actors, and individuals \u2013 including educators like Pacho, the only speaker to represent rural schools at the event. A few the images he lingers on showcase his students in the regional dress and dance performed during traditional festivities in Puno, others feature them in groups over the dry flat fields of Puno\u2019s Altiplano. And others feature students working on class activities developed by Pacho which had earned him the invitation to travel from Puno to participate in the global event \u2013 those developed as classwork and digital pedagogy for the XO Laptop, the centerpiece of the MIT-launched global One Laptop Per Child initiative.<\/p>\n

The visibility Pacho\u2019s efforts in Puno around local educational technologies and XO use was indeed unexpected. Better known within the national imaginary for its large indigenous Aymara and Quechua populations, cold stretches of Andean altiplano, and quinoa, potato, and alpaca wool production, Puno has typically been summoned among Lima\u2019s governing elite as the remote other to the capital city\u2019s modern cosmopolitanism (Jacobsen 1993). [1]<\/strong><\/a> Nonetheless, it was from there that the first XO-based users manual \u2013 a 100-page, teacher-centered text distributed online and translated from Spanish into English, French, and Arabic \u2013 was published (Salas 2009). It was there too, that alongside efforts to organize some of the largest conferences for rural teachers\u2019 XO use, that workshops for translating XO software into Quechua and Aymara began, organized with indigenous language activists and elders, aiming to be among the XO\u2019s first indigenous language localizations. It was there that schools like Lacachi gained a reputation for being among the more successful regional XO cases, where students maintained routine use of laptops. And it was there that Pacho, with several local teachers and engineers, had notably united to form one of Peru\u2019s first rural hack lab collective, Escuelab Puno.<\/p>\n

Pacho, however, stressed none of those achievements in speaking to his international audience. He used the floor instead to underscore the deep techno-fundamentalism that shrouded the arrival of the region\u2019s share of XOs \u2013 and recounted how laptops appeared without prior input from teachers, parents, or community leaders. As he described it: \u201cWhen they arrived, there was no other option [other than to accept them]\u2026 But when [the state] gave you the computer, it was really another duty on top of all the [routine] functions that teachers already have, and we were never trained to teach with such tools before.\u201d [2]<\/strong><\/a> He stressed that despite the attention his own school had managed to gain around its use of the XO laptops, local teachers\u2019 and rural communities\u2019 concerns, participation, and even innovations around the OLPC program had largely been ignored. As he put it in speaking to me in an interview, \u201cI know there are many teachers who work with the XOs well, people with very successful experiences in their classes. They should be brought together [and organized]\u2026 [Because] we\u2019re carrying enormous inequalities in education\u201d and \u201cWithout rural and intercultural priorities [around technology], we\u2019ll keep amplifying unequal divides.\u201d<\/p>\n

This paper looks too into the foundations and dynamics surrounding the Escuelab Puno\u2019s collaborations \u2013 perhaps one of the most surprising spaces from which hack lab collectives, new experiments in techno-cultural collaborations, and critical perspectives on existing techno-fundamentalist orientations, would emerge. As Peru\u2019s southern most province, Puno is known both nationally and internationally as the nation\u2019s folklore capital. Yet it was from there that new, historically-informed critiques started to emerge around the hyper-accelerated investments of the state in its expansive ICT for Education (ICT4E) initiatives, and the contradictions in state framings of \u201clocal inclusion\u201d as a core objective of its digital education programs. Years before other critical studies on the OLPC project in Peru (including those by entities like the International Development Bank) were released, rural hack lab networks like Escuelab Puno \u2013 that brought together free\/libre and open source software (FLOSS) advocates with public school teachers in multi-disciplinary, intercultural collaborations around digital technological uses in classrooms \u2013 had started to diagnose and respond to \u201ctechno-fundamentalist\u201d underpinnings in ICT4E deployments.<\/p>\n

Since 2003, I had followed the development of such networks around free software in Peru, following their extension into rural zones like Puno, where I would encounter an array of unlikely participants \u2013 from rural teachers to indigenous language activists \u2013 who would be drawn into FLOSS advocacy and reform work based on educational deployments of open technologies in educational institutions (Chan 2004a; 2004b; 2014 forthcoming). By 2009, rural teachers in Puno working around regional OLPC deployments had started to collaborate with local engineers in organizing educational workshops on FLOSS use and conferences oriented around discussing regional technological deployments. Offering alternatives to the state\u2019s official framings of technology as automatic catalysts for education reform across the nation, their efforts would culminate by 2011 in conferences around that drew in some 400 participants — including rural, indigenous teachers from across Puno\u2019s villages and transnational open media and language activists from Lima, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Spain, and Finland.<\/p>\n

This paper, based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2010-2012 with some three dozen local and global collaborators in Peruvian hack labs in Lima and Puno, aims to explore how and why such collectives were able to develop such a critical counter-balance to the techno-fundamentalist ethos that frequently unpins ICT4E initiatives. Their critiques would make visible how models of techno-fundamentalism powerfully operate in local ICT4E deployments, including those around OLPC, which experienced rapid and continual national expansions from 2007-2012, despite the stark lack of evidence supporting pedagogical efficacy. Within that period, OLPC in Peru grew from a pilot program of less than 2000 laptops in 2007 to a nationally-scaled project distributing over 900,000 XOs by late 2011. This paper explores the means by which such hefty expansions and investments are fueled by \u201ctechno-fundamentalist\u201d framings, and rely upon such framings\u2019 ability to gain traction beyond engineering and design circles. And it explores too the means by which local hack lab networks, as a crucial response to such developments, have cultivated their own multi-disciplinary global collaborations to extend critical alternatives of such framings. Beyond developing spaces for shared access to new technologies, the cultural work of building cross-disciplinary networks has been key to the role local hack labs in Peru have served, in the context of national ICT4E expansions. The dynamics and social structures that can either enable or truncate the flow of techno-fundamentalist framings, this work suggests, invites closer study, given how powerfully such framings \u2013 beyond Peru \u2013 have gained purchase and been rapidly transformed into national policy before debate among key sectors of the public and stakeholder populations can take place.<\/p>\n

Global Encounters: Prospective Futures and Techno-Fundamentalist Interfaces<\/span><\/h2>\n

Just months following the Interactive Technology Camp in mid-2012, the first large-scale study OLPC was released by the Inter-American Development Bank. Widely anticipated by education, technology, and policy experts worldwide, the study focused on pedagogical impacts in Peru \u2013 OLPC\u2019s largest partner nation, where nearly 1 million XO laptops were deployed in public schools as national policy \u2013 but had implications for similar initiatives that deployed another 2 million OLPC laptops in 42 other nations. And much like the more recently emerging studies on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) growing across US campuses, [3]<\/strong><\/a> the report raised significant questions on the results of the large and rapidly expanded institutional investments in un- or under-tested digital technologies. It stated, \u201cOLPC aims to improve learning in the poorest regions of the world\u2026 The investments entailed are significant given that each laptop costs around $200, compared with $48 spent yearly per primary student in low-income countries and $555 in middle-income countries. [Yet], there is little solid evidence regarding [its] effectiveness.\u201d It continued: \u201cAlthough many countries are aggressively implementing the OLPC program \u2026 [n]o evidence is found of effects on enrollment and test scores\u201d (Cristia et al. 2012).
\nSuch sober findings notwithstanding, it\u2019s become increasingly clear that investing in new ICTs and the discursive framings of elite global engineers and digital entrepreneurs continue to fundamentally impact national policies, particularly in relation to education. Educational technology analysts note the continuing expansion of ICT4E initiatives worldwide that claim to prepare diverse learner populations for a competitive, 21st Century information-centered economy through extending new digital technologies (Bajak 2012; Cristia 2012; Cristia et al. 2012; Oppenheimer 2012; Severin and Capota 2011; Trucano 2012). A range of nations \u2013 17 documented in Latin America alone as of 2011, and 20 others in African, Asian and Eastern European countries \u2013 had launched large scale ICT4E programs that generally claim to extend digital \u201cinclusion,\u201d connect the nation, and enhance future productivity by drawing presumably \u201cdisconnected\u201d learning sectors \u2013 particularly at risk, minority, indigenous, and economically marginalized populations \u2013 into global circuits of exchange (Oppenheimer 2012; Severin and Capota 2011). Tech industry analysts too note how new developments in low-cost, student-centered computing products were spurred, with IT firms like Intel adding some 7 million of its own student-tailored Classmate PC to schools across the Americas (Cristia 2012; Severin & Capota 2011). As IDB policy analyst Juli\u00e1n Cristia wrote, it was evident that OLPC was \u201cjust the tip of the iceberg\u201d (2012) in the global spread of ICTs as 21st century \u201clearning solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, there\u2019s little doubt that growing investments in new digital education projects continue \u2013 in rates that defy critical findings from recent studies, and despite scholarly arguments for more balanced approaches. Moreover, the uptake of such programs can exceed existing infrastructures for producing research. Indeed, their enthused, often un-cautious adoption seems to operate on the accelerated timescales of commercial IT developers than on the deliberative pace of academic researchers. They often betray an uncritical buy-in into the technological framings of the elite engineers and IT designers. Often based in \u201ccenters\u201d of IT innovation, such actors\u2019 unshaking faith in the irrefutably transformative power of ICTs express what technology studies scholars have cautioned as a \u201ctechno-fundamentalism\u201d (de la Pena 2006; Vaidhyanathan 2006; 2011). Such orientations are related to what have been critiqued before as a technological deterministic framing adopted in historical frameworks, in \u201cwhich historians often assign determinative power\u201d to technologies as a means of explaining historical change, and thereby \u201cgive credence to the idea of \u2018technology\u2019 as an independent entity, a virtually autonomous agent of change.\u201d (Smith 1994, xi). In its popular uptake beyond scholarly circles, historian of technology Merritt Roe Smith observes technological determinism surfaces as a largely explanatory force: \u201cIt is typified by sentences in which \u2018technology,\u2019 or a surrogate like the machine,\u2019 is made the subject of an active predicate: \u2018The automobile created suburbia.\u2019\u2026 \u2018The robots put the riveters out of work.\u201d (Smith 1994, xi).<\/p>\n

But whereas technological determinism operates as largely as an explanatory device towards the explanation of the creation of a present condition or presumably self-evident state of affairs, techno-fundamentalism operates more as a predictive device. Originating within elite technological design circles (such as those of the Google engineers), it asserts a \u201cblind faith\u201d in technology\u2019s impacts (Vaidhyanathan 2011, 50) and a \u201creligious\u201d like fervor that maintains and insists upon technology\u2019s solution-making impacts even without evidence to support such beliefs, or worse, in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. In its expression, that is, techno-fundamentalism projects a future vision of change in which a new technology is predicted as operating with the capacity to invariably \u2013 and almost \u201cmagically\u201d \u2013 resolve existing problems. And while such magical transformations may not yet have occurred, and may even seem unlikely to occur given the intractability of the existing problem at hand, change and progress is held out as the promise the new technology is sure to bring. As Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, such faith can indeed operate to \u201cdangerous\u201d ends (verging indeed on historical denialism) when allowed to \u201caffect our expectations and information about the world\u201d (Vaidhyanathan 2011, 81) to such a degree that flurried investments in new technologies that are out of step with reality are facilitated. Or, so too when they prevent more balanced deliberations from taking place.<\/p>\n

Crucially, the global circulation of faith-infused framings around the XOs was aided by other actors beyond partnering governments. From the project\u2019s beginning, Nicolas Negroponte, chairman of the OLPC Foundation, and founder of MIT\u2019s Media Lab leveraged supra-national, global governance networks to make his pointedly missionary zeal for the project readily known. At the XOs debut at the World Information Society Summit in Tunis in 2005, he boldly predicted that some 100 to 150 million XOs would be distributed across the world by 2008. Kofi Annan likewise hailed the machine as both \u201cinspiring\u201d and \u201can expression of global solidarity\u201d (Twist 2005) \u2013 praise that won instant international headlines after Annan demonstrated the XOs self-powering by a wind-up crank before a rapt audience of international policy makers.<\/p>\n

Academic studies began to emerge around the initiative critiquing Negroponte for his unflinching \u201ctechno-determinism\u201d (Toyama 2010 2011; Warschauer & Ames 2010), and a chronic resistance to learning from the lessons of local implementations. Such criticisms nonetheless had only modest impacts in slowing the persistent growth of ICT4E initiatives like OLPC (Oppenheimer 2012; Severin and Capota 2011). And Negroponte himself would continue to insist publically that: \u201cAccess to a connected laptop or tablet is the fastest way to enable universal learning.\u201d (Negroponte 2010) A long-time adherent to Seymor Papert\u2019s constuctionist learning model that viewed children as radically individualistic, self-directed learners and innate self-teachers, Negroponte further dismissed the need for project evaluation, stating in a September 2009 forum of the International Development Bank, as calls for studies on OLPC\u2019s impacts were starting to emerge: \u201cThat somebody in the room would say the impact [of the XO] is unclear is to me amazing \u2013 unbelievably amazing\u2026 There’s only one question on the table and that’s how to afford it… There is no other question\u201d (Negroponte 2009; Warschauer & Ames 2010). The efficacy of such argumentation in influencing the education policy makers in Peru was demonstrated in the growing expansion of the program \u2013 from 400,000 XOs in 2009 to more than double that by the end of 2012 \u2013 even after pointed critiques around the program began to emerge from IDB studies. Witnessing the continued global expansions of OLPC, in remarkable defiance of the voices of varied critics and educators, the Peruvian media scholar Eduardo Villanueva wrote incredulously: \u201cOLPC still believes in the power of one technological solution transforming realities as varied as Afghanistan or Uruguay.\u201d (Villanueva 2011)<\/p>\n

OLPC leadership insistences that laptop access was \u201cthe only\u201d relevant question for remote sites pointedly suggested that existing education-centered actors \u2013 from local teachers to local communities \u2013 were virtually negligible and could be regarded as external to deployments. [4]<\/strong><\/a> That such actors were even suggested to be impediments to \u201creal\u201d learning, was reflected in OLPC\u2019s five \u201ccore principles,\u201d which specified in detail the conditions in which laptops should be adopted \u2013 indicating that i) children be laptop owners, ii) beneficiaries be aged 6 to 12, iii) every child and teacher receives a laptop, iv) connectivity through a local network or the Internet, and v) software be open source and free. Other local actors\u2019 roles in project deployment, however, remained conspicuously un-addressed \u2013 a point that local teachers critiqued in OLPC\u2019s early years in Peru\u2019s rural zones (Chan 2011 2014). Their concerns were echoed by the IDB\u2019s reports that similarly cited the stark imbalance between OLPC\u2019s abundant information supply on student XO adoption and the neglect of other \u201cessential\u201d education factors: \u201c[OLPC\u2019s] underlying vision is that students will improve their education by using the laptop and through collaboration with their peers. However, the OLPC portal provides limited information about how to integrate the computers provided into regular pedagogical practices, the role of the teachers and other components essential for the successful implementation of the model.\u201d (Cristia et. al. 2012, 6)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Entry<\/a><\/p>\n
Entry page of OLPC\u2019s Website: laptop.org<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Yet despite the insistence by OLPC leadership on laptop access as \u201cthe only\u201d relevant question for improving education outcomes \u2013 and the message\u2019s reverberations through international forums like WSIS and partner governments like Peru\u2019s \u2013 attempts to construct more balanced, multi-disciplinary partnerships around new technology deployments were emerging from rural hack lab sites. Ongoing collaborations among local teachers and engineers based in Puno had begun to formalize into the creation of Escuelab Puno \u2013 a non-profit, civic association and hack lab focused on developing pedagogical and engineering support for educational technologies\u2019 classroom use. For three years prior to Escuelab Puno\u2019s founding, Puno had been the site of annual workshops organized by local teachers, engineers, FLOSS advocates, and indigenous language activists to discuss XO integration into local schools. Such activity resulted in gatherings that drew more than 400 teachers from across the villages and towns of Puno in the 2011 workshop; and culminated in the launching of Escuelab Puno by a mixed team of five local teachers and FLOSS advocates (Chan 2011; 2014).<\/p>\n

Neyder Achahuanco, the young systems engineer and part-time teacher helped co-found Escuelab Puno with fellow Puneneans he\u2019d gradually come to meet throughout his experiments with FLOSS technologies as a teenager. Speaking with me during an interview, he explained how his investments in FLOSS began when he was still in high school and volunteered to help local teachers migrate schools and universities from Windows to FLOSS platforms. Although only 26-year-old now, his first hand observations on Peru\u2019s \u201cdigital education\u201d initiatives \u2013 and the growing interactions they\u2019ve entailed between education and elite global engineers \u2013 already span a decade\u2019s worth of various local, national, and now (with OLPC) globally scaled cases. [5]<\/strong><\/a> With some 30,000 XOs deployed in Puno, he made little attempt to veil the critique he\u2019s formed after witnessing various models that privileged engineering expertise and marginalized teachers\u2019 input unfold over the years. As he stated flatly in an interview: \u201cHaving an engineer in front of someone [for training workhops], at the front of a room with a group of teachers just listening just does not work. It doesn\u2019t work because engineers weren\u2019t interested in understanding teachers, and teachers are not interested in becoming engineers.\u201d<\/p>\n

He made clear too that part of Escuelab Puno\u2019s mission is to caution against the risks of \u201ctechno-fundamentalist\u201d orientations that reify the \u201cself-evident\u201d need for rural transformation without envisioning parallel reform potentials in other sites, and that amplify the discrete solution-making capacities of IT and urban technology experts. He specified that among the factors that distinguish Escuelab Puno\u2019s deployment approach is its recognition that such techno-fundamentalist urges and their dependence on narratives of new technologies as forms of \u201cimported magic\u201d (Medina, da Costa Marquez, & Holmes forthcoming) are part of the problem, rather than the solution: \u201cWe\u2019ve become very critical of this idea embraced by many technology projects that the only thing that will save education, [or] improve society, is to throw technology at it. To say, \u2018Here, take this technology, your magic wand to escape from poverty! Here are your green laptops, your magic wand to improve students\u2026 [We forget] there\u2019s a huge, complex, diverse, and highly multi-disciplinary process in what we call education.\u201d<\/p>\n

He explained that part of Escuelab Puno\u2019s philosophy is reflected in its aims to foster spaces of dialogue between engineering and pedagogical experts by balancing such representation in its leadership. And he explained that one of the primary objectives that inspired its founding was to facilitate multi-disciplinary collaborations around XO deployments \u2013 specifically through a \u201cPartnership Program\u201d the collective proposed to regional and national ministry officials \u2013 that would create one-to-one teacher-engineer partnerships in classrooms to collaboratively design local XO instruction techniques and materials. The idea, he specified, was one that emerged only through the involvement of non-engineers in Escuelab Puno\u2019s projects: \u201cThe idea of the `Partnership Project\u00b4 didn\u2019t suddenly just dawn on us overnight. It was the outcome of almost a year of collaboration with educators, sociologists, Aymara and Quechua representatives \u2013 discussions around multiple interests, daily work, and work in rural sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

He insisted, moreover, that the partnership model they\u2019ve promoted would operate as much to the benefit of engineers, and their means of deriving solutions through technologies, as much as to local teachers: \u201cOur goal, we realized, was to improve a social problem [rather than a technological one]. Under the direction of just engineers, [we would never] have seen that the problem could be engineers. [Since] engineers always think of themselves as bringing solutions . . . [But] through having multi-disciplinary input . . . we realized that the problem was with us, in how we thought, and in what we said was the miracle solution and magic wand that would resolve everything. We realized we were creating more problems than solutions for teachers.\u201d Pausing for a moment, he underscores how the process of technological translation might in fact operate as much towards the de-centering and reform of technologist\u2019 consciousness, as it works towards the localization of technological artifacts, adding: \u201cBut we only achieved this after we sat around the table with everyone together. Only then could we really see what we were all doing . . . as engineers, teachers, sociologists, linguists, or ordinary people.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Entry<\/a><\/p>\n
Entry page of Peru Ministry of Education\u2019s OLPC\u2019s Website: http:\/\/www.perueduca.edu.pe\/olpc\/OLPC_Home.html<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

National Encounters: Intercultural Resources and Interfacing with the Present<\/span><\/h2>\n

A visit to the Ministry of Education\u2019s website for the OLPC initiative, which pushed forth one of the earliest national framings of computing at the periphery staged another expression of technological fundamentalism for online audiences. After entering the site via a page that features a single profile of a young student with her gaze fixed on her XO laptop, visitors can follow \u201cTestimonials\u201d links to further accounts of rural students with their newly minted XOs. A photo of two girls seated on a grassy slope working with theirs appears beside the quote \u201cToday we dream of a future, tomorrow, we\u2019ll achieve it.\u201d Another image is paired with the statement, \u201cToday I discover, tomorrow I\u2019ll innovate.\u201d And a final image in the column, where seven smiling students raise laptops triumphantly over their heads, is accompanied by the statement: \u201cToday we have our OLPCs, tomorrow we\u2019ll be prepared for the future.\u201d The page of anonymous quotations supplies no further information on where the photos were taken or when quotations were recorded \u2013 no names, no dates, no local details \u2013 a curiosity, given the $82 million spent for Peru\u2019s nearly 1 million XO laptops (Talbot 2008). The Ministry had even created a new office, DIGETE \u2013 the General Direction of Educational Technologies (Direction General de Tecnologia Eduactiva) \u2013 shortly after its partnership with OLPC began in 2008 to manage such expansive resources.<\/p>\n

Such state-produced visualizations are reminders that the techno-fundamentalist ethos of projects like OLPC aren\u2019t sustained by foreign Western engineers alone, but have relied centrally upon the fostering of local contacts and stewards \u2013 whether governments, local universities, or national NGO \u2013 to maintain and expand deployments. Oscar Becerra, the former Chief Educational Technology Officer for Peru\u2019s Ministry of Education and the original head of its OLPC deployment, for instance, stressed the capacity of new educational technologies to \u201cintegrate\u201d remote citizens in speaking to Western reporters in 2008, in the months before Peru\u2019s pilot program would expand to one of national-scale deployment. Explaining the rapid growth of the program \u2013 where some 400,000 XOs were planned for 9000 schools by the year\u2019s end \u2013 he stressed how it would allow rural children the freedom to not just imagine their own \u201cfuture\u201d \u2013 but to choose one for themselves. He said: “Our hope for [that student] is that he will have hope. We are giving them the chance to look for a different future\u2026 These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers \u2013 as any other child should, worldwide.” (Talbott 2008) Becerra\u2019s missive underscored a crucial point about the project: that its emphasis on the promise of digitality has as much to do with a stress on the singular power of IT, as it does with extending to \u201cdisconnected actors\u201d the option of both global and national inclusion. Through digitality, adopters would be able to enter the same universal operations marked as essential to all contemporary agents \u2013 that of thinking, learning, and creating with information \u2013 but which are rendered further away, presumably, without hi-tech.<\/p>\n

While Lima\u2019s governing elite enthusiastically adopted such a framing of technological pedagogy and digital literacy, a consideration of historical framings of the development of national educational models in Peru, and the extension of new literacies and technologies to \u201cperipheral\u201d sites like Puno placed such revolution-making promises in another light. Latin American historians of education have pointed to how national education models promoted among rural and indigenous populations from the 18th Century onward across Latin America were designed to assimilate rural and indigenous populations into the dominant social order (Perez 2009; Lopez and Kuper 2000; Lopez and Rojas 2006). Spanish literacy \u2013 rather than digital literacy \u2013 then was framed as the key to incorporating diverse minority populations, and remained so even well after nations won independence from colonial rulers. And while formal education models operated to the exclusion, depreciation, and gradual erosion of indigenous languages, by the mid-20th century they would cunningly begin to adopt bilingual instruction strategies, designed still to assimilate minority populations. By such accounts, new digital literacy initiatives were less revolutionary. Instead, merely a new means of replicating dominant approaches to education.<\/p>\n

From the 1970s onward, such assimilationist models came under ardent critique from various indigenous movements in Peru \u2013 from el Programa de Formacion de Maestros Bilingues de la Amazonia Peruana, FORMABIAP, to la Asociacion Interetnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana, AIDESEP (Perez 2009, Trapnell and Niera 2006). Together, they articulated new inter-cultural ideals that found their way into national policy in the 1990s, and continue today to sustain critical discourses for educational reforms. As Peruvian education scholar Norma Fuller writes, in the best of cases, \u201cinter-culturidad (interculturality) extends an ethical-political proposal which seeks to improve the concept of citizenship with the aim of adding recognition of the cultural rights of people, cultures, and ethics groups.\u201d (Fuller 2003, 10)
\nIndeed, drawing upon a history of intercultural activism and the development of critical approaches to dominant education models and the privileging of Spanish literacy, rural education actors working with new digital technologies similarly began to articulate new critical approaches to digital literacy promoted in state-asserted models of technology-enabled education. Their positions pressed for a distinct intercultural consciousness around technologies \u2013 articulating a form of inter-tecnologidad (inter-tecnologism) \u2013 that like inter-culturalism, aims to generate new pedagogical tools and methods around technologies, rooted in the articulation of ethical-political ideals and histories. Much like the decolonial ethics that intercultural theorists elaborated (Fuller 2003; Perez 2009; Trapnell and Niera 2006; Walsh 2004), such inter-technological ideals \u2013 as we shall see in the final section aimed to reapply intercultural histories, deploy technologies \u2013 both new and ancestral \u2013 as tools for cultural intervention, and provide alternatives to the dominant assimilationist politics embedded within national literacy and education policies.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Photos<\/a><\/p>\n
Photos pooled from participants of Sugarcamp Puno 2011.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Local Encounters: History as Resource and Interfacing with the Past<\/span><\/h2>\n

Back in Puno, Pacho\u2019s fellow educators and colleagues were indeed volunteering their time to develop such inter-technological commitments via a software translation project \u2013 undertaken several translation hackathons they organized in Puno. During one such event held during the same week in April 2011 as a larger SugarCamp conference had been organized to discuss the XOs integration into classrooms throughout the province, they could be found meeting for days around a table that balanced an unusual mix of coca leaves, offerings to the Pachamama, and various mobile digital gadgets. During various moments in the day, volunteers would cluster into discussion circles, tossing jokes around over the imprecise translation of terms between Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, as they worked. Their efforts drew upon the distinct expertise of an array of actors \u2013 of local teachers and programmers from Puno, Quechua and Aymara elder and youth activists, and participants of the Escuelab hack lab network from Europe and the Americas. The gathering was held in parallel with a larger 2011 Sugarcamp Conference organized by teachers in Puno \u2013 including Eleazar Mamani Pacho and Sdenka Salas around use of the XO laptop in classrooms. And by the end of the smaller translation hackathon, participants hoped to make significant headway into Quechua and Aymara software translations that could be installed onto the 1 million XOs in schools nationwide \u2013 even if the project remained independent of the state.<\/p>\n

Laptops screens were just being opened for the workshop when Francisco Ancco Rodriguez, a native Aymara speaker, and retired public school teacher from the nearby town of Acora \u2013 called for the group\u2019s attention. Drawing out a round bundle of cloth, he unfolded it onto the table\u2019s surface, and spread out the dried coca leaves clustered in its center. Selecting three, [6]<\/strong><\/a> he arranged them into a small fan formation, and began leading a short prayer in Aymara, holding the fan of leaves \u2013 a k\u2019intu \u2013 firmly in front of him. Just before placing the portion into his mouth, he waved the fan before him and blew a breathful of air over them [7]<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 and then invited the group to draw their shares from the pile.<\/p>\n

The ritual, a ceremonial offering known in the Andes as a despacho, is one that the language activists participating in the group had seen before \u2013 although not one that most of the technology activists were accustomed to paying deference to. Long performed in Andean communities prior to auspicious occasions, the despacho is still understood as a means of communicating with the natural world\u2019s spirits. In its most simplified version, it is framed as an offering to the Apu mountain spirits or the Pachamama \u2013 the female cosmic energy often translated as Mother Nature, but in the Andean world, associated as much with death as with birth and life. In whatever instantiation, however, it is practiced as a means of entering into a careful dialogue with ambivalent forces not fully controlled by man. Such powerful energy is read as running through varied objects in the Andean world, encompassing, as anthropologist Olivia Harris explains: \u201ca whole spectrum of sacred beings: the mountains, the dead; untamed places such as gullies and waterfalls… The defining character of these [energies] is not so much evil or malice as abundance, chaos, and hunger\u2026 [They] are the source of both fertility and wealth, and of sickness, misfortune, and death.\u201d (1995, 312) Such a worldview of nature and living spirits, while dramatic to untrained ears, is indeed a form of relating that is taken rather matter of factly in the Andes: as simply a living, present feature of an environment people are already in dialogue with. Rituals like the k\u2019intu incorporated into contexts like local hackatons, then, are means of rendering both nature and technology distinctly visible and legible, and that channel multiple logics \u2013 moral, civic, and cosmological \u2013 simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Following the Puno translation hackathon, participants pooled and shared photos of the event among themselves, across online social media platforms (as they typically would after any workshop). Their images vividly capture the diversity of actors involved in such events and working side by side, or often clustered in groups around a single computer screen. Including young indigenous language activists, Aymara and Quechua elders, public school teachers from Lima and the provinces, Latin American geeks, and Western hackers from Europe and the US, such images reflect the diversity of relations, encounters, and sentiments cultivated between participants. They demonstrate the range of diverse investments \u2013 and balance between engineering and local community perspectives \u2013 offered to build distinct technological futures by the meeting of such actors. Some elements (like the diverse arrays of mobile gadgetry) which looked comfortably familiar for anyone acquainted with hacker and geek publics before (Coleman 2011; 2013; Kelty 2005; 2008), but many of which (like the k\u2019intu) might not have been as familiar, and invited local translations. All, however, were visually referenced as the source of some kind of positive, generative energy that compelled participation, and that marked \u201cinclusion\u201d as less dependent upon interaction with a particular technology, and more instead about creating new cultural and inter-relational contexts that required multiple cultural and technological lenses to be legible.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Wired<\/a><\/p>\n
Wired Magazine June 2012 article: \u201cScreen time: Kids who had never seen a computer before are learning quickly.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

It\u2019s notable that these kinds of visualizations are far removed from the dominant ones that circulate around OLPC, and ICT4E projects more broadly. In this vision of \u201cdigital inclusion,\u201d what\u2019s typically depicted is the image of the rural child in contact with a glowing laptop \u2013 often against a starkly rural or provincial landscape. [8]<\/strong><\/a> Rarely referenced are the diverse agents, dispersed across rural and urban sites, whose global coordinations are needed to enable local deployments. Just as no mention is made of the complexities of trans-local negotiations and cross-epistemological engagements between interest groups. Such an image of IT, prominently deployed on OLPC\u2019s website, has traveled too to the Ministry of Education\u2019s own publications, and to imagery circulated by technology-centered news outlets like Wired Magazine, whose June 2012 issue touted OLPC\u2019s deployment of tablets in Ethiopia as \u201cgiving kids who had never seen a computer before [the ability to] learn quickly\u201d (Talbot 2012).<\/p>\n

Such images and aesthetics operate in distinct contrast to those that Puno\u2019s hack lab participants circulate. The hybridizing aesthetics and literacies they promote, are indeed ones that echo the vanguard experiments in technology, literacy, and education that Latin American historians note have stretched back more than a century in Puno. Such local practices emerging from Puno\u2019s altiplano explicitly challenged the Peruvian state\u2019s turn-of-the-century vision of modernization, and the roles of educational and literacy technologies that were projected to play therein. Works by Vicky Unruh (1994), Cynthia Vich (2000), Juan Zevallos Aguilar (2002), Guisela Fernandez (2005), and Jose Garambel (2010) stress how in the early 20th Century, Puno was recognized as one of the most fervent areas for indigenist literary movements in the region. Between 1900 and 1940, diverse artists and intellectuals seeking to reframe the nation\u2019s relationship to Indigenous culture, wrote and published numerous works that defended indigenous populations, condemned elite landowners\u2019 usurping of lands, and insisted on new models for education and creative production that better reflected local cultural concerns and visions for the future. Literary circles like Puno\u2019s Orkopata group, furthermore, pushed for new forms of literary expression that blended indigenous languages and narrative conventions with Castellano through the vanguard publication, Boletin Titikaka (1926-30) (Fernandez 2005; Unruh 1994; Vich 2002; Zevallos 2002).<\/p>\n

Between the late teens and mid-1930s, in fact, vanguard literary activity was emerging all throughout Latin America (Unruh 1994). Much like those outside the continent, their activity included several possible forms: the emergence of small groups of writers, committed to creative innovation; the affirmation and dissemination of critical and aesthetic positions through written manifestos; experimentation with multiple literary and artistic genres to cut across generic boundaries; the publication of magazines as outlets for both artistic experiments and cultural debates; and the organization of study groups that generally fought against modernity\u2019s push for cultural homogenization. What many participants noted was unique to Latin American vanguard circles, however, was their embeddedness within local contexts of deep cultural heterogeneity, and the relative proximity they had then to enable engagements and investigations into local language, folklore, and cultural history (Unruh 1994).<\/p>\n

Puno\u2019s Boletin Titikaka (1926-30) thus came to be known as the most lasting vanguardist magazines coming from Latin America\u2019s own peripheral zones \u2013 and from outside major cities (Fernandez 2005; Vich 2002; Zevallos 2002). It grew in fact, to have a readership not only across Peru, but across Latin America and globally \u2013 reaching as far as Lima\u2019s best known vanguard publication, Amauta. It was known for articles on \u201caesthetic Indoamericanism,\u201d and The Boletin\u2019s editor, the surrealist writer Gamaliel Churata devoted extensive attention to linguistic investigations in essays and bilingual poetry using vernacular verse. The magazine promoted the results of such studies, and indigenist orthography more generally, with the goal of making written Spanish appear visually like a more phonetic transcriptions of Quechua or Aymara. Thus alternative spellings of various Spanish phrases commonly appeared. Such practices, as literary historian Vicky Unruh writes, were meant to \u201cliberate aesthetics from chains of tradition\u201d (1994, 210) reproduced through the politics of language and technologies of literacy. Conventions in Grammar and genre were seen as adhering to problematic politics and \u201cblocking ‘true consciousness’\u201d\u2026 The artist\u2019s work, Unruh elaborates, was thus to \u201cforge new creative, and technical principles for language\u201d that were inventive as well as able to recover lost languages from national and ethnic pasts. [9]<\/strong><\/a> As she continues, \u201cGiven that to write and speak well signified privilege and functioned as keys to social mobility, the vanguards recuperative linguistic undertakings constitute a pragmatic rapprochement between the language of literature and the language of everyday life and underscore language\u2019s complicity in social conflict.\u201d (1994, 210)<\/p>\n

Other Punenan indigenists of the era worked specifically through educational models to challenge what they saw as the state\u2019s problematic application of literary technologies and educational models as a means to reform indigenous populations. Beginning of the 20th century, the Puno educator and intellectual Jose Antonio Encinas, issued some of the earliest national proposals for a model of indigenous education rooted within native culture (Garambel 2010). Encinas criticized the imposition of a system which he saw as operating on the principle that \u2013 as he described it: \u201ceverything native should be forgotten.\u201d He critiqued how state officials often saw indigenous dance and music to be of \u201cpoor taste\u201d \u2013 how municipalities prohibited indigenous communities from maintaining traditional dances, and how police were allowed to punish and fine Indians that entered restricted urban areas. He thus wrote: \u201cIf we educate students about Dante and Shakespeare \u2013 why not allow them all to sing the excellences of the races and beauties of the altiplano?\u201d His proposals eventually helped to push forth new state policy \u2013 the first on bi-lingual education \u2013 in the 1940s that recognized that Peru\u2019s two largest indigenous languages, Quechua and Aymara, should be used in class instruction. [10]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, the artists and educators of Puno\u2019s vanguard movements of the early 20th century, influenced the founding of one of the Warisata schools just outside Puno\u2019s borders, in the Bolivian town by the same name (Gustafson 2009; Perez 1962; Salazar 1997 2005). Founded in 1931 as a collaborative project between local Aymara community leaders and progressive Andean educators, it saw itself as a radical experiment in indigenous education and education through collective uses of technology. Education at the Warisata was seen as a key means of recuperating indigenous territory and expressing collective rights. Thus, the school didn\u2019t mimic Western or Limenan models, but was based on indigenous community structures, with a council of Aymara elders \u2013 the Parlamento Amauta \u2013 that oversaw it and maintained contact with local leadership; and technologies that were applied for both educational and communal purposes, through classes structured around agricultural and community-based production in weaving and ceramics. From its beginnings too, the school attracted global attention of diverse intellectuals, artists, writers, and journalists from both in and outside Latin America. Peruvians like Gamaliel Churata would be involved with the Bolivian school from 1932 onward, bringing other writers, artists, intellectuals and journalists from the region with him. [11]<\/strong><\/a> And its founding would compel the organizing of the first Interamerican Indigenist Congress in 1945. Held at the Warisata\u2019s rural site, it attracted politicians and education leaders from across Latin America, with participation from the governments of Per\u00fa, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba (Perez 1962; Salazar 1997 2005). [12]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Today, some 17 Latin American countries (L\u00f3pez and K\u00fcper 2000, 4) apply models of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) \u2013 an achievement that builds on the beginnings of rural education activists and reformers\u2019 agendas from nearly a century ago. Moreover, the legacy of such regional education activists and inter-cultural reformers is reflected in the work of Puno\u2019s hack lab participants, whose book shelves and workshop tables feature key works and publications from turn of the century intellectuals of the Altiplano, including Churata, Encinas, and Warisata\u2019s founders, and contemporary histories written on the like. Mentors for Escuelab Puno\u2019s teachers and engineers alike include some of the region\u2019s best known historians on intercultural and indigenous activism \u2013 from historians like Jose Garambel, to family members and archive keepers of Gamaliel Churata, to the Aymara artists Peruko Ccopacatty. Such archival practices and inter-generational references by Puno\u2019s hack lab participants demonstrate the diverse cultural resources that are used in their work to generate visions of new and \u201calternative futures.\u201d Their efforts delink the associations entrenched by dominant ICT4E visions of the periphery as locked within part and static traditions, and urban innovation and engineering centers (whether MIT or Silicon Valey) as the lone sites of innovation and future making. That such engagements might have escaped the historical conceptions of elite engineers and designers from global projects like OLPC \u2013 for as globally hyper-connected, information-rich, and structurally resourced as they might be, indeed \u2013 is what is may deserve further study.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/span><\/h2>\n

Indeed, despite OLPC\u2019s promotion by highly resourced and high profile Western engineers and design circles \u2013 that included support from such elite IT corporations as Google, Red Hat, and the chip maker AMD (Andersen 2011) \u2013 as well as by the Peruvian state and global governing bodies, it was not received with an uncritical embrace among Puno\u2019s rural technology collectives and local hack lab networks. Neither, however, did their orientations whole-heartedly reject OLPC as an unworkable option for provincial communities. Rather, the work of rural hack lab spaces like Escuelab Puno aimed to create more balanced, multi-disciplinary partnership around ICT4E deployments that cultivated alternatives through historically informed engagements with technology. Activities included co-organizing annual workshops with local teachers, other FLOSS advocates, and indigenous language activists to discuss XO integration into local schools, and then sought to bring OLPC into closer interface with local communities and experts. Their work, that is, aimed to counter the selective and narrowly construed set of narratives around technological futures that disproporionately underscored the \u201ckey\u201d role of engineers, technology designers, or IT corporates while underplaying or even ignoring other kinds of actors working around new technological deployments. They underscore too how central to what hack labs can extend to local communities is not simply access to new technological resources, but access to cultural and historical resources that aid the social organizing and extension needed to ground such resources in community life and social histories.<\/p>\n

Such approaches counter the techno-fundamentalist ethos that commonly underpins the most ambitious of ICT4E projects, and that operates less by acknowledging the value and resource of local histories than by making pronounced projections of the promise of future change (even when in direct contradiction of existing evidence or records). And yet, despite their critique of techno-fundamentalist frameworks around technology, the practices of Peru\u2019s rural hack labs underscore how they do not read the alternative as being only to retreat to relativistic isolation where no means of trans-local or global connection around digital networks could be imagined. The question they seem to pose instead is whether a more conscientious, humbled versions of global digital collaborations can be recovered for our networked age that acknowledges, as numerous science studies scholars from Arturo Escobar (2007; 2008) and Donna Haraway (1991; 1997) to Ivan da Costa Marques (2005) and Bruno Latour (1987; 1993; 2010) have underscored, how knowledge practices are always local, situated, and social. Rural hack lab practices \u2013 that bridge generations, urban and rural imaginaries, indigenous leaders with global hackers, and ethics pushing towards the future with others remembering an obligation to honor the past \u2013 push for such possibilities. The events they generate, while not urging for either outright technological revolution or rejection \u2013 might be read instead as creating spaces of \u201cawkward engagement,\u201d as anthropolgist Anna Tsing framed the term. They signal the possibility of a space where distinct forces and interests meet in a \u201czone of cultural friction\u201d \u2013 one where consensus and the dissolution of difference can\u2019t be taken for granted \u2013 and \u201cwhere words [may] mean something different across divides even as people speak.\u201d (2004, xi)<\/p>\n

Such mixed scenes suggest something more than a simple critique of dominant framing of technological fundamentalism. Here, actors work around the possibility of activating what Tsing called \u201cengaged universals\u201d instead (Tsing 2004, 8). Such forms acknowledge the dual opportunity and challenge they bear as bodies of \u201cknowledge that move\u201d (Tsing 2004, 7) across space and time. As such, they have the capacity to construct new bridges between sites of encounter \u2013 but to also foreclose other interfaces if not conscientiously activated. And here, then, a considered treatment of local histories and the past must be surely faced, even when more than a few episodes of conflict, betrayed trust, or long standing tension are involved. Dipesh Chakrabarty emphasized this in reminding his readers that universals could be called upon to do multiple kinds of work \u2013 among them, to serve as \u201ca necessary placeholder in our attempt to think through questions of modernity.\u201d Likewise, ICTs in their globalizing assertions might be said to be a means for us to think through questions of futuricity, unstable though such projections may be, and filled at once with pitched hopes for new prospective relations, as well as other ways to frame those past.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n\t\"Tabletop<\/a><\/p>\n
Tabletop at Sugarcamp Quechua and Aymara software translation hackathon, 2011.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Endnotes<\/span><\/h2>\n

[1]<\/strong><\/a> Aymara is still spoken by an estimated 41 percent of Puno\u2019s 1.3 million inhabitants, and Quechua spoken by some 30 percent.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/strong><\/a> He would later be sought out for interviews from global news outlets, including the US\u2019s National Public Radio and the Christian Science Monitor.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/strong><\/a> Similar findings have emerged too around MOOC platforms like Udacity, which have enrolled hundreds of thousands of students in low-cost courses worldwide, but which studies found produced lower pass rates of 20% to 44% for university courses that had typically seen 75% student pass rates. (Anders 2013).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/strong><\/a> That such actors were effectively framed as impediments to \u201creal\u201d learning, was reflected further in OLPC\u2019s mission statement, which contrasted images of existing classroom experiences to the change the XO experience offered: \u201c[We aim] to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.\u201d<\/p>\n

[5]<\/strong><\/a> In the case of Plan Huascaran, the national digital education initiative in Peru launched under then President Alejandro Toledo\u2019s administration, that preceded the state\u2019s OLPC investments.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/strong><\/a> The darkest, shiniest leaves that show the least signs of age, mold, or blemishing are typically selected.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/strong><\/a> This act, known as the pikuy, is that which is thought to allow the invocation of spiritual beings.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/strong><\/a> The familiar vision the computer-ready child that modern audiences have come to recognize as indicative of future-readiness remains stable, that is, except for the rural setting.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/strong><\/a> One of the most celebrated literary works of the period \u2013 the novel El Pez de Oro, was written by the Boletin Titikaka\u2019s founder, Gamaliel Churara, and offered an exemplary model of experiments in linguistic pluralism to this end. It demonstrated a vibrant mixing Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish together to reflect the cultural heterogeneity and sometimes fragmentedness of the region.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/strong><\/a> And his ideas also took form in establishing La Escuela Nueva in 1907, the first public school to be officially of indigenist orientation \u2013 in Puno. Encinas\u2019 work was in many ways built on the tradition of La Escuela de Utawilaya, founded in 1898 as a clandestine school that operated by night to teach Aymara Indians to read, and run by the Aymara community member, Manuel Z. Camacho an Camacho, after having participated in regional protests against the abuses of local landowners with Aymara leaders from nearby Puno towns \u2013 decided to create a space where peasants could acquire reading and literary skills as \u201cinstruments of freedom.\u201d (Garambel 2010) Despite the acts of violence and arrests he withstood, Camacho kept the school running until 1909. By 1918 some 45 primary schools run by Aymara Indians had formed in Plateria.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/strong><\/a> Various Bolivian and Mexican intellectuals were involved with the project, as was the North American writer and anarchist Frank Tanenbaum. And Puno-based writers and educators like Jos\u00e9 Antonio Encinas were among Peru\u2019s best known friends and visitors to the project. And Gamaliel Churata\u2019s own ties to the site are reflected in the art work of El Pez de Oro, which was drawn by Warisata teacher Carlos Salazar.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/strong><\/a> Multiple participating nations in would develop educational polities based on the recommendations of the Congress. By 1939, some 16 additional indigenous-run schools had been founded across Bolivia alone.<\/p>\n

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Anita Say Chan Sugarcamp Hackathon organized by Escuelab hack lab in Lima, Peru. November 2011. Standing atop a high stage at the Interactive Technology Camp in Lima, public school teacher Eleazar Mamani Pacho flips through several slides featuring the rural elementary school where he works as principal and teacher. The<\/p>\n

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