Seeing simultaneously yet lfferently is more easily done by two people than one, but ... one person can get the hang of it with time and effort.'A large number of stories have been told about computers and schools, based on widely varying assumptions.2In some, learning is assumed to be an individual process, readily accomplished by an isolated student in the company of a computer, with teachers "freed" from the tasks of presenting and testing basic information, and knowledge a quantifiable commodity students absorb in measurable chunks; in others, knowledge is assumed to be an evolving, multi-faceted social phenomenon, and learning a communal activity.Some stories rely on a consensus view of society, positing a single cultural inheritance that may be unprobleniatically agreed to as the essential content of schooling, and transmitted via computer, in everyone's shared best interests; others see decidedly conflicting interests at play in the world, and propose using computer technology as a tool in efforts to maneuver within these adversarial relations.This essay is concerned with another kind of assumption embedded in such stories, regarding the place of technology in social change.Consider this pair of statements:All culture can be coded so that it can be operated on with digital computers.. ..We have crossed the frontier and initiated irreversibly a sequence of developments that will take a long time to complete, in which the cultural potentialities of these technologies are tried and tested.Some can regret the change, but they cannot reverse it; and others.. .canwelcome it and work to fulfill it?To adolescent eyes, one of the many characteristics that distinguish males from females is that males use computers.Young girls see boys in the video arcades and men in the TV computer ads ....In school, girls see boys flocking to the computer room whenever they have time ....It is threatening to ignore the rules that dictate proper behavior for each sex; teenagers run the risk of alienating their friends, all of whom appear to obey the rules scrupulously.This is why simply 1.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Hank Bromley (1997) studied this question.