hopper, 1993 [abstract, overview, toc, switchboard, references]

1.1 Background

During the late 1980s, personal desktop computers with powerful applications became prevalent in almost every sector of society, and computing played integral roles in many people's lives. Yet the infusion and impact of computers in education were amazingly small when compared to business and government. Many industries began to experience the effects of this disparity, and spoke out in both public and political arenas. Industry leaders and government officials produced distinctly practical rationales for the integration of computers into educational settings. They suggested that technically sophisticated employees were becoming critical to compete successfully in the emerging global information economy, and the United States was in trouble with respect to the competitiveness of its products and services. The slow rate of technology transfer to education was often identified as part of the problem (King, 1989).
 
The pressures resulted in organized efforts to determine how computers could be introduced into education. The studies focused on what had gone wrong in the past, and what could be done to insure that future efforts would be more successful. One highly publicized attempt to address these questions across all levels was described in a report called POWER ON: New Tools for Teaching and Learning (OTA, 1988). The report found that the number of computers in education had been steadily increasing, but their numbers and quality were still too low for them to have a large impact across the curriculum. The authors of that report relied upon beliefs about the problems in past initiatives to support the following recommendations for future efforts:
 

 
Broad suggestions like these are based upon extensive analysis of reports from older projects and highlight problems that have thwarted previous efforts. Addressing these issues are prerequisites for insuring the success of advanced educational computing initiatives in the future. The power of publicity and changes in the political arena may allow these suggestions to be implemented in the near future. Unprecedented degrees of funding and support are now being appropriated by the United States Government to insure that advanced distributed computing environments become widely available during the mid to late 1990s (Gore, 1992). This national initiative is called the National Education and Research Network (NREN). The goal of this effort is to enhance national competitiveness and productivity through a high-speed, high-quality network infrastructure that supports a broad set of applications and network services. As the name indicates, educational institutions are to be major benefactors of this effort. The following are two of the goals of the network that could lead to direct benefits for education:
 

 
The NREN and related projects should allow educational institutions at all levels to test the value of computers through large scale implementation of today's most advanced computing technology. These environments will include networked computing systems that support two or more types of workstations or personal computers, and software with highly integrated functions capable of accessing and manipulating many widely distributed databases of linked text, graphics, sound and video. The telecommunications implicit in these conceptions of computer use, such as hypermedia, also carry with them a revolution in the computing paradigm like that which occurred in the shift from mainframe computers to microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.
 
© Mary E. Hopper | MEHopper@TheWorld.com [posted 12/04/93 | revised 04/12/13]