Microcomputers in Classrooms: Educational Technology or Social Practice?

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Abstract
Microcomputers were given to four elementary school teachers and changes in classroom organization, teacher‐student relations, and curriculum were observed. Teachers fit their new microcomputers into previously established classroom organizational practices; they seldom modified spatial and temporal arrangements. Teachers had two students work together at a computer; a different participation structure emerged in which students assisted each other and cooperated in completing tasks. Teachers used microcomputers as a means to meet previously established educational goals and as a means to reach previously unattainable educational goals. As a result of this yearlong investigation, two of the more extreme predictions about the role of microcomputers in education are questioned for being overly deterministic. Those who predict a computer revolution assume that technology causes changes in social organization while those who predict that schools will reject computer innovations assume that social organization determines technological use. Both positions confuse technology with social practice. It is not the features inherent in the machine but what people do with the machine that determine how microcomputers will be used in education. Recognizing that microcomputers are always part of a larger social system enables us to see the relationship between classroom organization and computer use as a mutually influential, not a unidirectional, relationship.