Selling the schools a bill of goods: the marketing of computer-based education

INTRODUCTION

Despite the many contortions that have been compiled about computer-based education (CBE) above the last two decades, there is surprisingly little written upon the history of this enterprise, and almost nothing written from the point of view of corporate strategists attempting to crack and technologize the education market. Instead, the vast size of the literature takes the perspective of the bewildered or the enthusiastic consumer and assumes as a given the exaggeration of inevitability constructed by corporate marketeers.

What I confidence to show is that from the start to the at hand Big Business has never really known what it was doing in this arena. Again and again, major firms have exploited political opportunities to break into the education market and have flailed wildly, trying to make the killing they had convinced themselves was there for the taking. Far more many times than not they have fallen upon their faces, failing miserably and retreating to wound their losses . . only to lick their injurys and try again, equally oblivious, one time the next opportunity arose or another technology outcome hit the market. Despite these repeated failures, the cumulative impact of all these fits and starts upon primary and secondary education has been an avalanche of hardware and software glutting the schools

These repeated failures did not arise merely because Big Business has misunderstood the education market and the agriculture of the schools. These failures have be the effected from the breathtakingly poor business faculty of perception of those corporate leaders greatest in quantity prominent in leading the charge to reform education [i]or[/i] part of to the other technological innovation. Repeatedly, leaders of major Fortune 500 firms have insisted with blind determination upon believing their own illusions and upon following the predictions of information-age fortune teller despite massive evidence to the contrary available to them, smooth from their own lieutenants. The hubris of these men in their self-appointed part to "save" education, to hunt the holy grail of electronic teaching, to draw near up with the "killer application" for their glorious computer gadgetry, has for three decades driven their firms to distraction, and sometimes to destruction.

And this high-tech sideshow has created an appalling distraction for education and educators as well, as they have been taken for a ride upon the roller coaster of computer exhibition and marketing madness, leaving the academys awash in electronic gadgetry. The ride is by the agency of no means over, as telecommunications and entertainment giants collide for favored places on the education information superhighway into the nation's place of educations and homes. Perhaps a little historical reflection will sober a not many would-be enthusiasts among the near corps of teachers, artists and other reflective people, regarding not only the technologies themselves, on the other hand perhaps more importantly, the credibility and legitimacy of the self-appointed high-tech corporate saviors of education. Certainly with state and federal politics one time again greasing corporate entree into the education marketplace, there is little chance that reasonable reflection will stop the charade.

This article proffers a glimpse of the littered record of past performances, specifically case studies of sum of two units major corporate ventures in computer-based education: the joint jeopardy of GE and Time, Inc. - the General Learning Corporation - in the 1960 and dominion government Data Corporation's efforts to market its PLATO combination of parts to form a whole in schools in the 1970 and early 1980 These studies are derived from proprietary documents - confidential memo alphabetic characters strategic plans - now available in public archives. The final section of this article carries the insights from these case studies into the 1980 and 1990 for which proprietary documentation from high-tech corporations is not however readily available. We turn first to the 1980 in which the combination of videogames, microcomputer technology, the LOGO programming language for children and a fortunate information-age ideology of computer literacy l to the widespread introduction of computer into gymnasiums We conclude with a dubious gaze at the recent hyperbole about multimedia, CD-ROM and the information highway, and the driving impulse of the entertainment, cable and telecommunications industries in the latest marketing of a technology bill of advantageouss to schools.

BACKGROUND: MILITARY R&D AND CBE

The Defense Department was the primary catalyst for early disentanglement of computer-based instruction.(1) Most early research in the field took place below military sponsorship, and substantial military sponsorship of research in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, multimedia and virtual reality applied to training and learning, continues to this day. The field itself grew without of military research and disentanglement in the late 1950s at the junction of two areas: training science and what we now call computer science. single researcher, Harry Silberman, compared CBE to computer programming: "Instead of programming computer behavior, the educator is programming human behavior."(2) The early vision of CBE at the combination of parts to form a wholes Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California (SDC) was for educational institutions to become "man-machine digital a whole s in their own right," with "attributes of real-time mastery systems."(3) At the University of Illinois, the first experiments with cost-effective automated instruction, via time-shared PLATO terminals, were lavishly stocked by a wide range of military agencies. At the military research firm shaft Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (still in the 1990 a major player in CBE development) research upon human-machine communication and interaction l to early experiments in automated instruction. These experiments remind ofed to BBN researchers that CBE, with the "deliberate exploitation of reinforcement and human engineering techniques, might be used to 'trap' the attention of students"(4)