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.