Final Reading (#3)

A considerable amount of research has been undertaken in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel on gender and attitudes toward educational uses of computers. Findings from these studies are generally quite consistent regardless of the nationality of students and teachers. Most researchers report that girls have more negative attitudes towards computing than boys. However, this does not mean that the girls' attitudes toward computers are negative in an absolute sense nor that boys' and girls' attitudes are radically different. However, the author thinks that it is more accurate to say that most boys and girls have positive attitudes toward computing, with the girls' attitudes being somewhat less positive than those of boys.

In the past, the education system in many countries war doubted and unacceptable. The teachers’ performances were marked as the low quality. During the time, the education in the nations has been developed and the schools have been given the pressure to be accomplished. More curriculums such as “computer literacy” have been integrated to the classrooms, in the school day. This may have even greater implications for women teachers. The curriculum on a chart was created to help teacher with overload schedules. As the author mentioned, the "curriculum on a cart" solution tends to be a generalized response to the demands of new curriculum projects in many schools, especially since other responses would require more money, something we cannot expect in times of the fiscal crisis of the state.

Many people believe that for students to learn, teachers must instruct, by which it is meant that learning depends on a teacher who correctly sequences curriculum content, drills students on correct performance, corrects mistakes, and then tests for achievement. On a daily level, children encounter problems of all sorts: logical, mathematical, physical, social, ethical. Problems require solutions. Thus the child strives toward a more comprehensive, more adequate, means of resolving problems, of synthesizing disparate ideas, of making sense of the world. Constructivist education, therefore, centrally involves experimentation and problem solving, and student confusion and mistakes are not antithetical to learning, but a basis for it.

Continued: Reading Part 2

Continued: Reading Part 2

The Mythic Machine: Gendered Irrationalities and Computer Culture
Zoe Sofia

The author mentioned two groups of people. Firstly, “technophillia” those with uncritical love of equipment and the opposite is “technophobia” those with lack of enthusiasm for new computer technologies. It is not surprise regarding widely reported finding from classroom studies is that boys comprise the vast majority of those computer users who ''love the machine for itself," and who like to spend long hours tinkering and game-playing on computers, whereas girls are far more likely to reject emotional identification with the computer as a "second self." In my opinion, I agree somewhat of this finding according to most of people around me, girls and boys are considered this way. The author also mentioned that “gender differences in attitudes towards computers and styles of computer learning could be interpreted differently from a perspective that was critical of technotopianism, alert to masculinist bias, and more sensitive to the relations between individual and cultural imaginaries”. However, I think this book was written in 1998; thus, I think now the world has changed and although the gender differences in attitudes towards computers still don’t change, they are getting more positive. I also believe that most modern women feel comfortable in using computers in their everyday life.

In the chapter, the writer also pointed out the concern between computers and games format to the reason why boy are more positive about computer. The author also compared men to “Jupiter space” and women to “Athena figures.”
Men can uninhibitedly love for itself a machine that offers them one more port of entry into a world of command/control technology to which they already feel entitled.

The gendering of computers as feminine may inhibit some women from learning to "master" a technology or "hack" into a space that is metaphorically equivalent to themselves (computers and women as the "to be used" rather than "the users," as occupiable spaces rather than space invaders).

Reading Report

Book Title: Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing As a Social PracticeAuthor: Bromley, Hank

Author’s perspective toward computer: “If the computer is a symbol, and the kind of education (and society) it represents is the object of strong desires, but with just what it does represent being a disputed matter, then this book is an intervention in the dispute over what to read in the-computer-as-symbol.” The author mentioned that budget cut and economy are the big issues concerning purchasing computers and integrating technology systems into schools.

I like what the author pointed that “participation in public life is currently limited by inadequate amounts of information is misleading. While some specific kinds of potentially helpful information are not well distributed, on the whole people are drenched in information. The problem isn't getting enough, but making sense of what we already have; providing everyone with an on-ramp to the "Information Superhighway" won't help with that problem. Information—raw data and facts—does not amount to knowledge until it is organized somehow, shaped by an intelligence, gathered toward some end. And knowledge does not constitute ideas, let alone wisdom, until it is further digested and pondered. Ideas may in some sense be power, but knowledge is now, much less information.”

The author insisted that “as a result, when computers are introduced to the classroom, they bring along a hidden curriculum of "deep assumptions about the nature of mentality.” Technologies embody the conditions out of which they emerge and tend to reinforce those conditions wherever they are used. With reference to the specific social conditions both Smith and the Luddites decry, "technology has a general drift of denying the particularity of place, of group, or of person" Also, computer use enforces this formalized, abstracted mode of social interaction, and discards the stereotype.

Thidawan Charoenpornsook

My name is Thidawan Charoenpornsook. I was raised and born in the warm, big family in Thailand. I have two brothers and two sisters, and I am the fifth and the youngest one in the family. My family members are closed together and live together in the same house. Also, my grandmother, my uncles, my aunts and my cousins live nearby my house.