Twenty Years of Australian Educational Computing: A Call for Modern Traditionalism
Anne McDougall · Australian educational computing · 2005
This article reflects on twenty or more years of development and research in educational computing. It argues that the emphasis on exploiting the technology in the service of contemporary ideas about learning held by many of the early workers has been lost to a focus on the technology itself and its capabilities. In schools this has led to an artificially “vocational” emphasis on the learning of skills in using applications designed not for learning but for use in business and industry. Using the term “modern traditionalism” (Robertson 2003), the article advocates the use of information and communications technologies in education for the enhancement of students’ broader learning, and draws attention to the need to re-visit and build on some of the earlier work to avoid re-inventing ineffective wheels and to benefit from the valuable pioneering work in the relatively short history of our discipline. Warning: This article contains references to work published earlier than the year 2000. Readers confident that nothing worthwhile could have been said about computers in education before that time should read no further.