Information Technology and the Sociology of Education: some preliminary thoughts.

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.