Computer Literacy as Ideology

In contrast to the quotes above, not all student resistance is ambiguous. A few students have very strong feelings, both about computer use in society and in school:

Student #14: I don’t like to use the computers. It’s - well, what you can see, what’s being done in society with computers I don’t believe in at all, with the big rush for technology, capitalism, it’s just all interrelated and I hate it... like, manual techniques are a lot better than punching in at the front of a computer...

Interviewer: Okay, so you would prefer this course if it never included computers, or do you think it added anything at all?

Student #14: I didn’t think it was really beneficial because most of the things we did were things we could talk about.

The last comment by this student raises an important issue for educators: the potential replacement of classroom dialogue by computer interaction. There is much research, including some of our own (see Goodson & Mangan, 1992), which indicates that computer use results in more individualized forms of learning. This may be a good thing, but if it results in isolating students from dialogue with each other and with their teachers, it may at best be a mixed blessing.

Student reactions to the concept of enrichment, or to the gradual accumulation of computer skills, display a similar range of responses, as illustrated by this dialogue:

Interviewer: How about other uses in school... Have you ever had cause to use other computers in school?

Student #15: Yeah, I took, in Grade 11 I took a Computer Science Course... and so we did a lot of programming in that course... So that was a quite difficult course actually, here anyways. Because one of the teachers is - he makes it difficult, I found. And I had a Computer, the very beginning Computer course in Grade 10. I can’t remember what it was... and Computer Science, people won’t take, cause, you know, people in school say, "Oh that Computer Science course is so hard". You know, that kind of thing.

What seems to be indicated by this interview, and by several similar ones which have reported negative reactions to computer studies courses, is that the assumption that there is a continuum of computer knowledge which is transferable from one arena of learning to another may be false. Encouraging students to take computer science or even keyboarding courses in the early years may, for some, actually be counter-productive to the development of attitudes and skills which will be useful in non-technical careers.