Virtual Objects, Cyberspace Texts, and Real Students:
Before examining the educational uses of computing (or rather networked digital information technology), we must consider it in the context of other information technologies.
First some propositions:
- Information technology does not begin with computers (Innis, McLuhan, Eisenstein, Ivins)
- Every form of infotech embodies or actualizes a theory of education and scholarship
- Every new infotech comes at a cost (Socrates): there's no free lunch
- The printed codex book is fast becoming an exotic object
- No medium is an island: Every new form of IT is remediated by previous ones and in turn changes them. (Grushin and Bolter)
- We naturalize all media born before yesterday, and see the new as "technology" (the typewriter as warm, fuzzy, cuddly object)
- We take each new form of IT as a form of presence and an escape from writing (Derrida).
Therefore, some essential questions
- Is it all still reading and writing, or will argumentation and even cognitive processes change? [Drury]
- What are the uses of computing and education
- Does computing only serve old approaches to the humanities, or does it iself provide new subjects for study in the humanities?
- Finally, what happens when one bases an entire institution on the connectivities of hypertext -- the University Scholars Programme, NUS