Without comment on the rest of the Steve's interesting thoughts, I would like to briefly comment on this point:
>We might begin by trying to understand why radio, television, film--all the >earlier technologies that promised to reform education--have failed to make >a difference in what goes on in those "brick spaces" that Tom talks about... >Steve Eskow A major argument made by historian of education Larry Cuban is that, since radio, television, and film did not transform schools, information & communications technologies (ICTs) will not do so either. Though I agree with the underlying idea that no technology in and of itself, will automatically transform institutions (and, indeed, critiquing naive assumptions about the deterministic role of technology has been one major focus of my work), I think the comparison between radio, television, and film, on the one hand, and ICTs, on the other, is problematic. Radio, television, and film have never been critical day-to-day tools of knowledge workers in the U.S., certainly not in the way that ICTs are. Almost anybody who is producing knowledge, whether in academic, business, entertainment fields, or otherwise, uses computers and the Internet constantly to do so, in ways that such knowledge workers seldom used radio, television, and film previously. The role of ICTs in education is thus much more natural and compelling than that of radio, television, and film. I would suggest that attempts to generalize a "ceiling effect" for the long-term role of ICTs in schools based on prior educational technology research on the diffusion of radio, television, and film are flawed. Mark -- Mark Warschauer Professor of Education and Informatics University of California, Irvine Berkeley Place 2001 (for mail); Berkeley Place 3000 (for visitors) Irvine, CA 92697-5500 tel: (949) 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 [EMAIL PROTECTED]; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
