Academic Language Learning, Transformative Pedagogy, and Information Technology: Towards a Critical Balance

Abstract

* The title of Murray's article in this issue aptly captures the difficulty, and perhaps futility, of attempting to chart policy to guide the evolution of information technology (IT) and its impact on education. Like Proteus, IT assumes different shapes in different contexts and when viewed from different perspectives. Some see IT as a new educational deity, a potential messiah set to rescue society from a moribund educational system staffed by lethargic teachers. The missionary zeal to develop students' computer literacy echoes the pious beliefs of literacy educators past. In the early 19th century, public education and literacy for the masses were justified as a means of enabling the unschooled to read the Holy Book and save their eternal souls. On the pews facing the altar of computer literacy we find a predictable group of believers: corporate leaders and politicians genuinely anxious to ensure that the educational system delivers the intellectual resources to fuel the engines of the knowledge society; other corporate and educational leaders, with lean and hungry looks, interested in using IT as the lever to turn a profit on a privatized educational system; and many in the public, primarily from the middle classes and including many educators, who have been convinced that computer literacy is the key to their children's social and economic advancement. For all these groups, the time to prepare for the state of grace that