How Education Made Computers Personal - A Oral History Workshop

Since the 1960s California’s Counterculturalists considered both computers and education as tools for change. They lamented how computers are “used to control people instead of to free them” and created educational and techno-logical visions “to change all that” (Peoples Computer Company 1972). They came up with community memories, personal computers and virtual communities. Computer technologies, by being modeled after educational aspirations, became personal and social. At the workshop, some of the most involved contemporary witnesses meet young scholars to revise a techno-determinist genealogy of computers and education. Together they reflect the limits and benefits of reviving alternative computer pedagogies within our digital cultures.

As contemporary witnesses we invited Lee Felsenstein, Liza Loop and Howard Rheingold. As scholars, Clemens Apprich (DCRL), Paula Bialski (DCRL), Jérémy Grosman (Université de Namur).