As anyone involved in schools well knows, there
is no shortage of information on the Internet about education,
particularly its hopes and dreams regarding technology. Here are
a few of the main sites—covering both efforts to promote
school computing, as well as critiques of the campaign (some of
which are hilarious).
Various magazines and newspapers now cover the issue of school
technology. One of the best, in my mind, is eSchool News:
www.eSchoolnews.com/
For general news about education in the K-12 years (and occasional
updates on school technology) I found Education Week
to be almost indispensable:
www.edweek.org/
Another good and relatively new education magazine is Education
Next. It is published out of Harvard, under the auspices
of Stanford University, and edited by the somewhat conservative
education critic Chester E. Finn, Jr.:
www.educationnext.org/
If you're interested in the academic study of school
computing, one of the main journals is Educational Technology
Review:
www.aace.org/pubs/etr/issue4/index.cfm
A wonderfully insightful source of news and commentary on schools
is the weekly "On Education" column in The New
York Times, currently being written by Michael Winerip:
www.nytimes.com/
Among the various organizations that question computers in schools,
one of the leaders is The Alliance for Childhood.
In October 2000, the Alliance published "Fool's Gold,"
an aggressive report on the topic signed by many prominent educators
and psychologists. Since then it has followed up with targeted
campaigns on a range of specific issues.
www.allianceforchildhood.net/
Irreverent but informed commentary can be hard to come by on the
subject of school technology. But one analyst who delivers regularly
on this front is Gary Stager. An adjunct professor of education
at Pepperdine University, Stager also writes a provocative column
as editor-at-large for District Administration
magazine:
www.stager.org/articles.html
There are also a multitude of discussion sites devoted to technology
in schools. One of the most varied is Edtechnot.com:
www.edtechnot.com/
To keep up with what the federal government is doing in this realm,
visit the U.S. Department of Education's division of educational
technology:
www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/index.html
A new effort recently underway is to develop standards for school
use of technology. The project is being directed by the International
Society for Technology in Education (ISTE):
cnets.iste.org/
For some context on the business prospects for "courseware,"
and technology in general, see the annual Trends reports for the
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA):
www.trendsreport.net/
An article in Wired magazine,
by the popular critic of modern-day media visuals Edward R. Tufte,
Yale professor of statistics, graphic design, and political economy:
www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
A delightful satire on what President Abraham
Lincoln might have achieved, if only personal computers had been
available in the 1800s:
www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
"The Computer Delusion,"
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997. (This is the
article that led to this book):
www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm
"Greedy Clicks," Salon
magazine, Feb. 2, 2000, a critique of one of the Clinton Administration's
ill-fated final efforts to close the so-called "digital divide":
www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/02/02/digital
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