A Cultural Studies Analysis of Logo in Education
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A CULTURAL STUDIES ANALYSIS OF LOGO IN EDUCATION Angelos S. AGALIANOS Submitted to the University of London in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute of Education Policy Studies & Mathematical Sciences London, August 1997 };TOY}; TONE!}; MOY 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas for this thesis developed within an institution that was both supportive and academically stimulating. Many people -from both inside and outside the Institute of Education- have helped, guided, and taught me during this project. I mention only a few here by name, but I would like to express my gratitude to all the friends and colleagues who have given me help and support for the completion of this study. From the commencement of this project I was fortunate to have two supervisors (from two different departments of the Institute), professors Geoff Whitty and Richard Noss, which made the project an exciting -although at times very demanding- enterprise. I have received an enormous amount of encouragement and support from both, I am deeply grateful to them. I am indebted to both Richard and Geoff for their vision, their brilliant insights, their patience, and their ability to translate complex ideas into understandable statements. They have had a profound influence on my intellectual development over the last five years. They have fullfilled their mission as supervisors in the best way: beyond their capacity as invaluable academic mentors, they have been sympathetic listeners and advisers against the various difficulties which the life of a research student often involves. They have both been generous with their time and comments. I am grateful to all my interviewees in both the United States and Britain, who kindly gave up some of their time to provide me with valuable data. Put in alp habetical order, the list of interviewees includes Hal Abelson, Janet Ainley, John Berlow, Peter Butt, Al Cuoco, Mike Doyle, Wallace Feurzeig, Paul Goldenberg, 3 Ronnie Goldstein, Brian Harvey, Celia Hoyles, Uri Leron, Henry Lieberman, George Lukas, Richard Noss, Seymour Papert, Dave Pratt, Mitchell Resnick, Sherry Turkle, Bill Tagg, Dan and Molly Watt, Uri Wilensky, and John Wood!. Acknowledgment should be made of the assistance that I received from Maria Oliveira, Margaret Williams and other teachers who -on top of talking to me about their experiences with Logo- allowed me to observe their classrooms and collect useful field notes; Paul Clifford, Janet Ainley and Dave Pratt have also helped in this respect. Celia Hoyles, Lulu Healy and Stefano Pozzi deserve a special mention as they gave me access to useful material which had themselves collected for their Groupwork With Computers project. Special thanks to Michael Young, Harvey Mellar and Ken Jones. Attending Michael Young's MA course Technology, Work & Education has helped me sharpen my per spectives on sociological approaches to technology. Attending Ken Jones' MA mo dules has helped me significantly to develop my thinking on Cultural Studies. Har vey Mellar's IT in education course was very useful, too. Thanks also to Harvey Mellar and Michael Young for reading draft chapters of my work at the stage of upgrading from M.Phil to Ph.D registration and for providing essential feedback. I have also benefited enormously from discussing aspects of my work with a number of other people: thanks to Tony Green, Michael Apple, Andy Brown, Roger Dale, Celia Hoyles and Gunter Kress, for their advice. Chris Bigum has helped me bye-mail. Hank Bromley and Dave Shutkin have sent me useful material. I appreciate talks with Hank ,during his visit in London. I have also found his doctoral dissertation a valuable source of ideas. I For reasons that I will explain in Chapter Four, the identity of two of my interviewees is not disclosed. 4 I am grateful to Roger Hewitt for lending me part of the technical equipment necessary for my interviews in the United States. I also wish to thank the Greek State Foundation of Scholarships (IKY), since it was with its generous financial support that this study became possible. Finally, I wish to thank my parents and two brothers for their patience and support throughout this study. And Petro for his friendship and help at times when I was ready to give up .. 5 ABSTRACT Education does not take place in a vacuum, it is a terrain where conflicting ideologies compete and relations of power are inscribed. Despite, however, the accumulation of studies illustrating the social and political nature of schooling, sociological work concerned with educational computing is in short supply; with few exceptions, sociologists of education have not directly addressed educational computing. The development of IT in education in the last two decades has been largely uncritical and the field has been dominated by technocentric approaches. This thesis is an effort to develop a sociological language for understanding educational computing and suggests that the introduction and use of IT in education should be situated within its social, political and cultural context. Appropriating ideas from the sociology of education, sociology of technology and cultural studies, the thesis uses a cultural circuit analysis of Logo progran1I11ing language as a case-study in the sociology of culture in order to illustrate some of the ways in which the introduction of new technologies in education may interplay with the maintenance and/or transformation of existing power relations. The first part of the thesis raises questions that strive to situate technological products -and particularly computers in education- within a sociological paradigm. It establishes four main arguments that run through the whole study: • that most existing accounts of IT in education are inadequate; • that sociology of education and cultural studies can -and should- add to our social perspectives on the use of IT in education; 6 • that technological artefacts used in education are socially constructed and can be analysed in terms of a "circuit of cultural production"; • that we could demonstrate the utility of such a model by running it through the development and implementation of a major IT phenomenon, that is Logo. In the second part of the thesis, analysis is divided in five parts (five analytically distinct "moments"). Through reconstructed accounts of participants and secondary sources, analysis of "moment" 1 (production) demonstrates the contingent and unstable nature of Logo as constantly changing and developing technology in the context of the decision-making processes. Analysis of "moment" 2 (text) discusses Logo as a "text", its "philosophy" for education, and the embodiment of its epistemological principles in the technical design of the language. Analysis of "moment" 3 (marketing/economics) discusses the role of marketing, politics, and economics in the development and evolution of Logo; it illustrates that the activities of mediators like government departments and the microcomputer industrial lobby were crucial to the modification and redevelopment of Logo beyond the context of its initial development. Analysis of "moment" 4 (context) situates the introduction of Logo to mainstream schools within its social and political context suggesting that the disintegration of "progressive" education largely constituted the context for the "decline" of Logo during the process of restructuring of formal education in the late 1970s and 1980s. Against this background, analysis of "moment" 5 (consumption) discusses the ways in which Logo was received in the educational arena and was implicated in the politics of educational innovation, looking into the place that Logo occupied within the institutional and organisational cultures of mainstream schools. Finally, based on the discussion of Logo as a case-study and the findings thereof, the 7 thesis summarises the main analytic and methodological messages and points to directions for further research. 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ......................................................... 3 Abstract ........................................................................ 6 Table of Contents ......................................................... 9 Abbreviations .................... ......... ................................. 10 List of Appendices ...................................................... 13 Chapter One: Introduction ...................................... " 14 Chapter Two: Perspectives on Information Technology 39 Chapter Three: Computers in Education: towards a sociological understanding 67 Chapter Four: A "circuit of culture" Framework for the Analysis of Logo .................................. 88 Chapter Five: Social Processes in the Production of Logo 123 Chapter Six: Logo as Text ...................................... , . 160 Chapter Seven: Marketing and Economics in the production of Logo ............................................. .. 182 Chapter Eight: From progressivism to the Conservative Restoration: the social and political context of Logo's introduction to mainstream schools 204 Chapter Nine: Windows on the "Consumption" of Logo 219 Chapter Ten: Lessons from Logo.................................. 245 Appendices ......................................................................... 262 References & Bibliography """""."""""""""""."."""". 313 Notes .................................................................................. 348 9 ABBREVIATIONS AERA American Educational Research Association APE Advanced Placement Exams ARPA Advanced Research