ABSTRACT
During 1985-7, twenty ‘Brits’ and twenty Americans carried out collaborative research into the use of computers in education as part of the UK/USA Microelectronics Seminar (1985-7) of the National Union of Teachers (UK) and the National Educational Association (USA). I was twinned with Alan November, then the Computer Coordinator for Wellesley School District in Massachusetts, and our research was into the use of electronic mail to give a ‘real audience’ for children’s writing. Those who have come across Alan’s book, Empowering Students with Technology, written ten years later (November 2001), or heard him present at conferences in the USA or the UK, will understand why this early partnership was highly formative in my own development. Small-scale funding from BT, secured with the assistance of the NUT, was used (by bending the rules) to pay for telephone lines, TTNS (The Times Network for Schools) email software, and expenses to hold teachers’ meetings. The fi ndings reported in this paper encapsulate what we learnt from research into development work that was extremely novel for the teachers involved. It threw up all the major issues that I now know to be typical of technology innovations. In the intervening years I have been engaged in elaborating what I learnt then rather than disproving it in any way. At the same time as carrying out this research I was working on the Support for Innovation Project (see the introduction to this section) and beginning to read the research literature. While helpful, this often ignored the psychological processes of identity construction that are always central to technology innovation. It was clear that to understand the process of introducing computers into education a wider analysis was needed, drawing on theories from both sociological and psychological research. Although this chapter stands as a historical record, it still has many resonances today.
