Toward a Sociology of Educational Technology

By its nature, technology changes constantly. Technology in education is no different. At the time the original version of this chapter was prepared, the Internet was still the exclusive province of academic and a few educational enthusiasts; distance education was a clumsy congeries of TV broadcasts, correspondence, and the occasional e-mail discussion group; discussions of inequalities in how educational technology was used focused mostly on the mechanics of distribution of and access to hardware; perhaps most saliently, the developing wave of constructivist notions about education had not yet extended far into the examination of technology itself. Internet connectivity and use in schools became a major issue in 1996 during the U.S. presidential campaign that year, and later became a central political initiative for the U.S. Government, with considerable success (PCAST, 1997; ISET, 2002). At about the same time, distance learning, as delivered via online environments, suddenly came to be seen as the wave of the future for higher education and corporate training, and was also the source for some of the inflated stock market hopes for “dotcom” companies in the late 1990s. As access to computers and networks became more affordable, those interested in the “digital divide” began to switch their attention from simple access to less tractable issues such as how technology might be involved in generating “cultural capital” among the disadvantaged. The intervening years have also witnessed emerging concerns about how technology seems to be calling into questions long-standing basic assumptions about educational technology: for example, might on-line learning in fact turn out to be less dehumanizing than sitting in a large lecture class? All the issues noted here are addressed in this revision. 5.2 INTRODUCTION