Towards a Sociology of Educational Computing.

The development of educational computing in the last two decades has been largely uncritical and the field is dominated by technocentric approaches. With few notable exceptions, sociologists of education have not directly addressed educational computing. As a result, the social, political and cultural origins and implications of educational computing have remained to date underexplored. Viewing education as a predominantly social and political phenomenon, this paper suggests that information technology in education should be situated within its neglected social context. It draws on research which appropriates ideas from the sociology of education, sociology of technology, social theory and cultural studies, and looks into the development and evolution of Logo programming language in education in United States and British primary and secondary schools as a case study in the politics of educational change. The predominant lesson drawn from this analysis is that when Logo was introduced, preexisting social relations were largely able to utilize the new technology as an avenue for reasserting themselves, thus reinforcing the status quo. In both United States and United Kingdom primary schools, Logo ended up being seen most often as an elementary geometrical program, or simply as an exercise in enjoyable computer interaction. In secondary schools, if Logo was used at all, it was used in the context of "teaching programming" rather than as a means of expressing mathematical ideas. The dominant and powerfully established school structures changed the meaning of Logo and assimilated it into the existing system, to the disappointment of its original developers. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/AEF)