Negropontisms and Rhetoric that inhibits proceduracy

01 December 2011

Negropontisms and Rhetoric that inhibits proceduracy

Negroponte’s rhetoric has always called upon his work with Papert in Senegal, as the go-to source for equating the naturalness of a child learning how to walk and talk to learning how to learn on a computer. In his TED Talks, during the initial rollout of the OLPC, he also boasts that the XO/OLPC program will bring programming back to kids with three new languages available for kids to explore. Yet, as I have learned more and more on the Sugar Labs team at NDSU, kids don’t naturally assume programming and debugging skills that we are trying to instill via a procedural literacy program at a local elementary school.

Take for instance, this video from the OLPC Australia. While I think the affordances of this program are many, I can see Negroponte’s deism, i.e. the notion that the relationship between a child and an XO laptop will naturally transmit deeper literacy skills, into the language of the educators throughout the film. (NOTE: This particular topic will be discussed on a greater scale in a collaborative chapter in Writing Posthumanism Writing)

If you watched the video, you will also see the children working with the activities that our Sugar team have deemed as being more popular, expressive, but not as bent on procedural, programming skills: Speak, Record, and one educator even indicated word processing skills with Write. What I find wrong here is the disconnect between Negroponte’s naturalness rhetoric toward programming, which gets subsumed by the more common perception of essential computer literacy skills as word processing and working with images, which is fine, but learning apps is not what’s going to guarantee any child a job; not unlike the American notion that getting a Bachelor’s degree will get every young adult a job.

Here’s where I find the importance of OLPC programs like Uruguay, as well as our own initiative at NDSU. Proceduracy, the ability to break down complex processes into code, is the literacy that will take a child far in the upcoming economy in getting a job, but more importantly, it will grant them a higher sense of agency to navigate these multifarious networks that have been created on- and offline. This is why we are trying to compose a curriculum that doesn’t assume proceduracy as a skill that comes naturally, but instead as a literacy learned with a, as Dr. Brooks would say, longer, slower burn of learning. This longer burn should be the goal versus the short burst of intense engagement that you see in the above video. Yes, that engagement is important, but how do we get educators to a place where they can use it to produce a longer burn? My answer: drawn from Latour (concept of dingpolitik and “Modes of Existence”) dialogue processes by which a network of people and the objects used create a series of check points to construct the knowledge deemed necessary and useful in theory and praxis.