| Since primitive "teaching machines" first emerged in the 1960s, the discourse of educational computing has been given over to a fundamental debate between "two cultures": those who use an exaggerated rhetoric to promote technological devices as educational panaceas and those who counter that there is really little to be gained through the instructional use of computers, and indeed much to be lost when educational transactions are thus dehumanized.;This dissertation represents an attempt to use a poststructural perspective, informed in particular by the works of Michel Foucault, in order to explore alternative ways of speaking about and understanding the implications of educational computing. Poststructural thought is characterized by an intense concern with language. Thus, rather than celebrating or decrying the instructional implications of computerization, I seek to participate in the discourse by focusing upon the discourse of educational computing itself, as found in newspaper articles, scholarly works, policy documents, advertisements, and other cultural texts.;Following the alternative avenues of inquiry which such an approach opens for me, I explore a number of questions which have been too long sublimated to the conflict between the proponents and decriers of educational computing: What assumptions are carried with computers into the classroom? How are these assumptions perpetuated discursively by various groups, including the media, the public, policymakers, software producers, and academics? Who profits from these assumptions, and who loses? How do these ideologies and assumptions, as they are reflected and perpetuated within the discourse, construct and delimit the use of digital technology in education? How are key terms, such as "knowledge" and "learning," redefined within these discursive contentions for power? And what is the role of the intellectual in a society increasingly driven by the imperatives of technology?... |
