1.3.3 The Technical Contexts of Past Projects
It is time for education to reassess the types of characteristics that should be emphasized for tools for
education in order to take advantage of new and powerful functions and insights. There have been three
concerns in educational computing projects that derived from the technical nature of computers.
The first concern has been determining what type of software functionality can be used to meet
particular educational goals. This concern is reflected in the following passage by Mary Alice White:
What are the critical tools for education? Who is identifying them, pointing out what
we need with appropriate standards of quality? We know that the financial world lives on spreadsheets,
modems, and information bases. We know that lawyers find a legal database indispensable to searching
for legal precedents, and that physicians depend on medical databases. .. If we cannot say what we
need and want, then we must expect the industry to produce a variety of software, good and bad,
to find out what the educational market will buy. (White, 1989, p. 8)
A second concern is facilitating interaction between the learner or author and the computer.
A third and final concern is adapting computer software across situations and over time.
Educators today face a bigger issue than compatibility between microcomputers from different vendors.
They are facing the type of problem that a few early groups of innovators faced who began during the
1960s and continued to work in the field through the 1990s (generally in academic settings with powerful
mainframe computers). These groups were faced with porting their approach from the mainframe environments
in which they originally grew, and implementing their approach to computers in education using microcomputers.
While concerns about the match between software functionality and educational goals continue to be important
and pervasive concerns for successful projects, other technical concerns are becoming more pervasive and complex.
The emergence of large linked databases of multimedia and the connectivity and collaboration afforded by
the emerging computer networks will only be available to provide potential benefits to learners if the
multitude of usability and adaptability challenges are overcome successfully. Many problems that will
need to be dealt with may go beyond technical challenges to include conquering organizational challenges.