ABSTRACT
I came to graduate school late in life from a job in television broadcasting. I worked as a broadcast engineer in radio and television for nearly 20 years, and my knowledge of computers has grown out of that job. Indeed, I bought my first PC in 1986 because many of the machines I operated were run by computers, and I needed to keep up with current trends in communication technology. After I received my PhD it was, in part, my computer experience that helped me to obtain several job interviews. During one on-campus interview at a large Midwestern university, I was invited to attend a computer conference. The conference was small, but some important people in computer-assisted instruction (CAI) presented. Along with the CAI experts, a contributing editor of Wired and another academic who had just written an anticomputer book presented. The conference presentations were interesting enough; however, the concluding, town meeting discussion turned into a free-for-all, in which the academic presenters felt obliged to defend the use of CAI in the classroom, and the computer-phobic academic alternately attacked and was attacked by the audience. The Wired editor, who was seated near me in the back of the room, seemed bored with it all. As a former broadcast engineer in radio and television, I was somewhat annoyed with the conversation. It was probably my understanding of computers as a practical tool that prompted me to ask, “Shouldn’t we, as teachers, take advantage of any tool that engages our students?” The CAI specialists inferred that my question was not very pedagogically sound, and the computeraphobe, who had never owned a computer in his life, dismissed me with a witty aphorism. “Well,” he said. “My mother used to put honey on my oatmeal so I would eat it.” My question, obviously irrele-
vant to the more engrossing theoretical discussion I had just interrupted, was basically ignored. For me, their responses not only minimized the value of computers as intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for literacy but downplayed the practical benefits of simply learning how to use a computer. They also seemed to be dismissing the connection between the literacy skills we teach and what students actually do on the job or in their communities after they finish school.
