Over on the Creatures of Thought blog, is an excellent, detailed essay on how computers have been linked to education from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The belief that computers would revolutionize education took root long before the microcomputer era; it had spread rapidly across American universities in the 1960s. The political and technical moment were both ripe: the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs both catalyzed massive new flows of federal money into education, and into educational research in particular.
Meanwhile, time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to simultaneously access a single large, expensive computer, made it conceivable to teach whole classrooms of students at once by computer (though this was still very expensive, given the price of computers at the time).
However confused the original purpose and function of classroom computers, they became by the mid-1980s an unquestioned necessity. That schools were obligated to expose their charges to the basics of the computer became an accepted fact-of-life of twentieth-century schooling.
This mirrored a broader trend of personal computing: in a handful of years it went from curiosity that large organizations ignored, to an experiment that a few early adopters within large organizations took up, to a requirement that large organizations controlled. Nothing better embodied this transformation than the IBM Personal Computer.
See this excellent piece here.
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/d1oNB64
via IFTTT
