Telling Tales Out of School: Modernist, Critical, and Postmodern “True Stories” about Educational Computing

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Abstract
This article presents an analysis of the discourses of educational computing in terms of modernist, critical, and postmodernist narratives which attempt to tell “true stories” of how and why new technologies are to be harnessed in the service of educational ends, and about the prospects and pitfalls therein. The authors argue that it is principally the interpretive constraints imposed by these stories, and only secondarily the material capacities and constraints of the technology itself, which differently construct possibilities for pedagogic relations amongst students, teachers, and educational technologies. The authors conclude with an argument for (a) an “ethics of narration” in the weaving of tales with the focus squarely on the possibilities for agency and equity as these are enabled and constrained within particular emplotments and (b) seeking out typically untold and suppressed accounts in determining which tales told about educational computing are most likely to produce and to enable liberatory outcomes.