The Age of Ambivalence: Early Experiments in Educational Computer Conferencing

Abstract

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) resolved the ambivalence of computers in favor of potentials aligned with organizational and pedagogical features of distance education. This “coding” of educational computing confirmed critical appraisals that identified computers with commercialization, commodification, and deskilling. But where critics posited these as intrinsic properties of computers, they are better seen as potentials actualized in contingent development processes. Through these processes, a set of values, goals, pedagogical techniques, and organizational strategies derived from distance education emerged as lenses through which the educational potentials of computers were identified and concretized in systems like PLATO. The coding of educational technology evident in CAI was supported by an understanding of education as a process of stimulus and response, a focus on information delivery in response to the separation of teacher and student, the individualization of learners, a shift of control to learners, a functional analysis of teaching, the development of practices like guided didactic conversation as bases for designing learning materials and media, and the industrial organization of education in mass distance systems. The technologies emerging from within this technical code confirmed the fears of early critics of educational computing.