6.3 SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY

6.3.1 The Sociology of Organizations

Schools are many things, but (at least since the end of the 19th century) they have been organizations: intentionally created groups of people pursuing common purposes, and standing in particular relation to other groups and social institutions. Within the organization, there are consistent understandings of what the organization's purposes are, and participants stand in relatively well-defined positions vis-à-vis each other (e.g., the roles of teachers, student, parent, etc.). Additionally, the organization possesses a technical structure for carrying out its work (classes, textbooks, teacher certification), seeks to define job responsibilities so that tasks are accomplished, and has mechanisms for dealing with the outside world (PTA meetings, committees on textbook adoption, legislative lobbyists, school board meetings).

  Sociology has approached the study of organizations in a number of ways. Earlier studies stressed the formal features of organizations and described their internal functioning and the relationships among participants within the bounds of the organization itself Over the past 20 years or so, however, a new perspective has emerged, one that sees the organization in the context of its surrounding environment (Aldrich & Marsden, 1988). Major issues in the study of organizations using the environmental or organic approach include the factors that give rise to organizational diversity and those connected with change in the organization.

Perhaps it is obvious that questions of organizational change and organizational diversity are pertinent to the study of how educational technology has come to be used, or may be used, in educational environments, but let us use the sociological lens to examine why this is so. Schools as organizations are increasingly under pressure from outside social groups and from political and economic structures. Among the criticisms constantly leveled at the schools are that they are too hierarchical, too bureaucratized, and that current organizational patterns make changing the system almost impossible. (Whether these perceptions are in fact warranted is entirely another issue, one that we will not address here; see Carson, Huelskamp & Woodall, 1991.) We might reasonably ask whether we should be focusing attention on the organizational structure of schools as they are, rather than discussing desirable alternatives. Suffice it to say that massive change in an existing social institution, such as the schools, is difficult to undertake in a controlled, conscious way.

Those who suggest (e.g., Perelman, 1992) that schools as institutions will soon "wither away" are unaware of the historical flexibility of schools as organizations (Cuban, 1984; Tyack, 1974) and of the strong social pressures that militate for preservation of the existing institutional structure. The perspective here, then, is much more on how the existing structure of the social organizations we call schools can be affected in desirable ways, and so the issue of organizational change (rather than that of organizational generation) will be a major focus in what follows.

To make this review cohere, we will start by surveying what sociologists know about organizations generally, including specifically bureaucratic forms of organization. We will then consider the evidence regarding technology's impact on organizational structure in general, and on bureaucratic organization in particular. We will then proceed to a consideration of schools as a specific type of organization and concentrate on recent attempts to redefine patterns of school organization. Finally, we will consider how educational technology relates to school organization and to attempts to change that organization and the roles of those who work in schools.

6.3.1.1. Organizations: Two Sociological Perspectives. Much recent sociological work on the nature of organizations starts from the assumption that organizations are best studied and understood as parts of an environment. If organizations exist within a distinctive environment, then what aspects of that environment should be most closely examined? Sociologists have answered this question in two different ways: For some, the key features are the resources and information that may be used rationally within the organization or exchanged with other organizations within the environment; for others, the essential focus is on the cultural surround that determines and moderates the organization's possible courses of action in ways that are more subtle, less deterministic than the resources-information perspective suggests. While there are many exceptions, it is probably fair to say that the resources-information approach has been more often used in analyses of commercial organizations, and the latter, cultural approach used in studies of public and nonprofit organizations.

The environmental view of organizations has been especially fruitful in studies of organizational change. The roles of outside normative groups such as professional associations or state legislatures, for example, were stressed by DiMaggio and Powell (1983; see also Meyer & Scott, 1983), who noted that the actions of such groups tend to reduce organizational heterogeneity in the environment and thus inhibit change. While visible alternative organizational patterns may provide models for organizational change, other organizations in the same general field exert a counter-influence by supporting commonly accepted practices and demanding that alternative organizations adhere to those models, even when the alternative organization might not be required to do so. For example, an innovative school may be forced to modify its record-keeping practices so as to match more closely "how others do it" (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979).

How organizations react to outside pressure for change has also been studied. There is considerable disagreement as to whether such pressures result in dynamic transformation via the work of attentive leaders, or whether organizational inertia is more generally characteristic of organizations' reaction to outside pressures (Astley & Van de Ven, 1983; Hrebiniak & Joyce, 1985; Romanelli, 1991). Mintzberg (1979) suggested that there might be a trade-off here: Large organizations have the potential to change rapidly to meet new pressures (but only if they use appropriately their large and differentiated staffs, better forecasting abilities, etc.); small organizations can respond to outside pressures if they capitalize on their more flexible structure and relative lack of established routines.

Organizations face a number of common problems, including how to assess their effectiveness. Traditional evaluation studies have assumed that organizational goals can be relatively precisely defined, outcomes can be measured, and standards for success agreed upon by the parties involved (McLaughlin, 1987). More recent approaches suggest that examination of the "street-level" evaluation methods used by those who work within an organization may provide an additional, useful perspective on organizational effectiveness (Anspach, 1991). For example, "dramatic incidents," even though they are singularities, may define effectiveness or its lack for some participants.

6.3.1.2. Bureaucracy as a Condition of Organizations. We need to pay special attention to the particular form of organization we call bureaucracy, since this is a central feature of school environments where educational technology is often used. The emergence of this pattern as a primary way for ensuring that policies are implemented and that some degree of accountability is guaranteed lies in the 19th century (Peabody & Rourke, 1965; Waldo, 1952). Max Weber described the conditions under which social organizations would move away from direct, personalized, or "charismatic" control, and toward bureaucratic and administrative control (Weber, 1978).

The problem with bureaucracy, as anyone who has ever stood in line at a state office can attest, is that the organization's workers soon seem to focus exclusively on the rules and procedures established to provide accountability and control, rather than on the people or problems the bureaucratic system ostensibly exists to address (Herzfeld, 1992). The tension for the organization and those who work therein is between commitment to a particular leader, who may want to focus on people or problems, and commitment to a self-sustaining system with established mechanisms for ensuring how decisions are made and how individuals work within the organization, and which will likely continue to exist after a particular leader is gone. In this sense, one might view many of the current problems in schools and concerns with organizational reform (especially from the viewpoint of teachers) as attempts to move toward a more collegial mode of control and governance (Waters, 1993). We will return later to this theme of reform and change in the context of school bureaucratic structures when we deal more explicitly with the concepts of social change and social movements.

6.3.1.3. Technology and Organizations. Our intent here is not merely to review what current thinking is regarding schools as organizations but also to say something about how the use of educational technology within schools might affect or be affected by those patterns of organization. Before we can address those issues, however, we must first consider bow technology has been seen as affecting organizational structure generally. In other words, schools aside, is there any consensus on how technology affects the life of organizations, or the course of their development? While the issue would appear to be a significant one, and while there have been a good many general discussions of the potential impact of technology on organizations and the individuals who work there (e.g., Naisbitt & Aburdene, 1990; Toffler, 1990), there is remarkably little consensus about what precisely the nature of such impacts may be. Indeed, Americans seem to have a deep ambivalence about technology: Some see it as villain and scapegoat; others stress its role in social progress (Florman, 1981; Pagels, 1988; Segal, 1985; Winner, 1986).

Some of these concerns stem from the difficulty of keeping technology under social control once it has been introduced (Glendenning, 1990; Steffen, 1993, especially Chapters 3 and 5). Perrow (1984) suggests that current technological systems are so complex and "interactive" (showing tight relationship among parts) that accidents and problems cannot be avoided. They are, in effect, no longer accidents but an inevitable consequence of our limited ability to predict what can go wrong. Others, however, stress that technology is an essential part of human culture and that our images of technology would be better if elaborated to include the notion of "extending our humanity" (Rothenberg, 1993).

6.3.1.3.1. Historical Studies of Technology. As a framework for considering how technology affects or may affect organizational life, it may be useful to consider specific examples of earlier technological advances now seen to have altered social and organizational life in particular ways. A problem here is that initial prognoses for a technology's effects--indeed, the very reason a technology is developed in the first place--are often radically different from the ways in which a technology actually comes to be used. Few of those who witnessed the development of assembly-line manufacture, for example, had any idea of the import of the changes they were witnessing; although these shifts were perceived as miraculous and sometimes frightening, they were rarely seen as threatening the social status quo (Jennings, 1985; Marvin, 1988; see also 1.5).

Several specific technologies illustrate the ways initial intentions for a technology often translate over time into unexpected organizational and social consequences. The development of printing, for example, not only lowered the cost, increased the accuracy, and improved the efficiency of producing individual copies of written materials; it also had profound organizational impact on how governments were structured and did their work. Governments began to demand more types of information from local administrators and to circulate and use that information in pursuit of national goals (Boorstin, 1983; Darnton, 1984; Eisenstein, 1979; Febvre & Martin, 1958; Luke, 1989).

The telephone offers another example of a technology that significantly changed the organization of work in offices. Bell's original image of telephonic communication foresaw repetitive contacts among a few key points rather than the multi-point networked system we see today, and when Bell offered the telephone patents to William Orton, president of Western Union, Orton remarked, "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" (Aronson, 1977). But the telephone brought a rapid reconceptualization of the workplace. After its development, the "information workers" of the day--newspaper reporters, financial managers, and so forth--no longer needed to be clustered together so tightly. Talking on the telephone also established patterns of communication that were more personal, less dense,and formal (de Sola Pool, 1977).

Chester Carlson, an engineer then working for a small company called Haloid, developed in 1938 a process for transferring images from one sheet of paper to another based on principles of electrical charge. Carlson's process, and the company that would become Xerox, also altered the organization of office life, perhaps in more local ways than the telephone. Initial estimates forecast only the "primary" market for Xerox copies and ignored the large number of extra copies of reports that would be made and sent to a colleague in the next office, a friend, or someone in a government agency or university. This "secondary market" for copies turned out to be many times larger than the "primary market" for original copies, and the resulting dissemination of information has brought workers into closer contact with colleagues, given them easier access to information, and provided for more rapid circulation of information (Mort, 1989; Owen, 1986).

The impact of television on our forms of organizational life is difficult to document, though many have tried. Marshall McLuhan and his followers have suggested that television brought a view of the world that breaks down traditional social constructs. Among the effects noted by some analysts are the new position occupied by political figures (more readily accessible, less able to hide failures and problems from the electorate), changing relationships among parents and children (lack of former separation between adult and children's worlds), and shifts in relationships among the sexes (disappearance of formerly exclusively "male" and "female" domains of social action; Meyrowitz, 1985).

Process technologies may also have unforeseen organizational consequences, as seen in mass production via the assembly line. Production on the assembly line rationalized production of manufactured goods, improved their quality, and lowered prices. It also led to anguish in the form of worker alienation, and thus contributed to the development of socialism and Marxism, and to the birth of militant labor unions in the United States and abroad, altering forms of organization within factories and the nature of worker-management relationships (Boorstin, 1973; Hounshell, 1984; Smith, 1981. See also Bartky, 1990, on the introduction of standard time; and Norberg, 1990, on the advent of punch card technology).

6.3.1.3.2. Information Technology and Organizations. Many have argued that information technology will flatten organizational hierarchies and provide for more democratic forms of management. Shoshana Zuboff's study of how workers and managers in a number of corporate environments reacted to the introduction of computer-based manufacturing processes is one of the few empirically based studies to examine this issue (Zuboff, 1988). However, some have argued from the opposite stance that computerization in fact strengthens existing hierarchies and encourages top-down control (Evans, 1991). Still others (Winston, 1986) have argued that information technology has had minimal impact on the structure of work and organizations. Kling (1991) found remarkably little evidence of radical change in social patterns from empirical studies, noting that while computerization had led to increased worker responsibility and satisfaction in some settings, in others it had resulted in decreased interaction. He also indicated that computer systems are often merely "instruments in power games played by local governments"(p. 35; see also Danziger et al., 1986).

One significant reason for the difficulty in defining technology's effects is that the variety of work and work environments across organizations is so great (Palmquist, 1992). It is difficult to compare, for example, the record keeping operation of a large hospital, the manufacturing division of a major automobile producer, and the diverse types of activities that teachers and school principals typically undertake. And even between similar environments in the same industry, the way in which jobs are structured and carried out may be significantly different. Some sociologists have concluded that it may therefore only make sense to study organizational impacts of technology on the micro level, i.e., within the subunits of a particular environment (Comstock & Scott, 1977; Scott, 1975, 1987).

Defining and predicting the organizational context of a new technology on such a local level have also proved difficult. It is extraordinarily complex to define the web of social intents, perceptions, decisions, reactions, group relations, and organizational settings into which a new technology will be cast. Those who work using this framework (e.g., Bijker, Hughes & Pinch, 1987; Fulk, 1993; Joerges, 1990; Nartonis, 1993) often try to identify the relationships among the participants in a given setting, and then on that basis try to define the meaning that a technology has for them, rather than focus on the impact of a particular kind of hardware on individuals' work in isolation.

A further aspect of the social context of technology has to do with the relative power and position of the actors involved. Langdon Winner (1980) argues that technologies are in fact not merely tools; they have their political and social meanings "built in" by virtue of the ways we define, design, and use them. A classic example for Winner is the network of freeways designed by civil engineer Robert Moses for the New York City metropolitan region in the 1930s. The bridges that spanned the new arterials that led to public beaches were too low to allow passage by city buses, thus keeping hoi polloi away from the ocean front, while at the same time welcoming the more affluent, newly mobile (car-owning) middle class. The design itself, rather than the hardware of bridge decks, roads, and beach access points, defined what could later be done with the system once it had been built and put into use. Similar effects of predisposition-through-design, Winner argues, are to be found in nuclear-power plants and nuclear-fuel reprocessing facilities (Winner, 1977,1993).

An attempt to link the critical and positivist models of how technology interacts with social and political structures is provided by Street (1992). He proposes that subjecting to public scrutiny both the "hardware" side of technology and the fundamental assumptions that underlay its design and creation may lead to an improved way of handling the political decisions that necessarily now must be made with regard to implementation of particular technological systems.

6.3.1.3.3 Technology and Bureaucracy. One persistent view of technology's role within organizations is as a catalyst for overcoming centralized bureaucratic inertia (Rice, 1992; Sproul & Kiesler, 1991a). Electronic mail is widely reputed to provide a democratizing and leveling influence in large bureaucracies; wide access to electronic databases within organizations may provide opportunities for whistle-blowers to identify and expose problems; the rapid collection and dissemination of information on a variety of organizational activities may allow both workers and managers to see how productive they are and where changes might lead to improvement (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991b). While the critics are equally vocal in pointing out technology's potential organizational downside in such domains as electronic monitoring of employee productivity and "deckling"--the increasing polarization of the workforce into a small cadre of highly skilled managers and technocrats, and a much larger group of lower-level workers whose room for individual initiative and creativity is radically constrained by technology (e.g., Garson, 1989)--the general consensus (especially following the intensified discussion of the advent of the "information superhighway" in the early 1990s) seemed positive.

But ultimately the role of technology in an increasingly bureaucratized society may depend more on the internal assumptions we ourselves bring to thinking about its use. Rosenbrock (1990) suggests that we too easily confuse achievement of particular, economically desirable ends with the attainment of a more general personal, philosophical, or social good. This leads to the tension that we often feel when thinking about the possibility of replacement of humans by machines. Rosenbrock (1990) asserts that:

Upon analysis it is easy to see that "assistance" will always become "replacement" if we accept [this) causal myth. The expert's skill is defined to be the application of a set of rules, which express the causal relations determining the expert's behavior. Assistance then can only mean the application of the same rules by a computer, in order to save the time and effort of the expert. When the rule set is made complete, the expert is no longer needed, because his skill contains nothing more than is embodied in the rules (p. 167).

But when we do this, he notes, we lose sight of basic human needs and succumb to a "manipulative view of human relations in technological systems" (p. 159).

6.3.1.4. Schools as Organizations. One problem that educational sociologists have faced for many years is how to describe schools as organizations. Early analyses focused on the role of school administrator as part of an industrial production engine: the school. Teachers were workers, students--products, and teaching materials and techniques--the means of production. The vision was persuasive in the early part of this century when schools, as other social organizations, were just developing into their current forms.

But the typical methods of analysis used in organizational sociology were designed to provide a clear view of how large industrial firms operated, and it early became clear that these enterprises were not identical to public schools. Their tasks were qualitatively different; their goals and outcomes were not equally definable or measurable; the techniques they used to pursue their aims were orders of magnitude apart in terms of specificity. Perhaps most importantly, schools operated in a messy, public environment where problems and demands came not from a single central location but seemingly from all sides; they had to cater to the needs of teachers, students, parents, employers, and politicians, all of whom might have different visions of what the schools were for.

It was in answer to this perceived gap between the conceptual models offered by classical organizational sociology and the realities of the school that led to the rise among school organization theorists of the "loose-coupling" model. According to this approach, schools were viewed as systems that were only loosely linked together with any given portion of their surroundings. It was the diversity of schools' environment that was important, argued these theorists. Their view was consistent with the stronger emphasis given to environmental variables in the field of organizational sociology in general starting with the 1970s.

The older, more mechanistic vision of schools as mechanisms did not die, however. Instead, it lived on and gained new adherents under a number of new banners. Two of these--the "Effective Schools" movement and "outcome-based education"--are especially significant for those working in the field of educational technology, because they are connected with essential aspects of our field. The effective-schools approach was born of the school reform efforts that started with the publication of the report on the state of America's schools, A Nation at Risk (National Commission, 1983). That report highlighted a number of problems with the nation's schools, including a perceived drop in standards for academic achievement (but note Carson et at., 1991). A number of states and school districts responded to this problem by attempting to define an "effective school." The definitions varied, but there were common elements: high expectations, concerned leadership, committed teaching, involved parents, and so forth. In a number of cases these elements were put together into a 11 package" that was intended to define and offer a prescription for good schooling (Mortimer, 1993; Fredericks & Brown, 1993; Purkey & Smith, 1983; Rosenholtz, 1985; Scheerens, 199 1).

A further relative of the earlier mechanistic visions of School improvement was seen during the late 1980s in the trend toward definition of local, state, and national standards in education (e.g., National Governors' Association, 1986, 1987) and in the new enthusiasm for "outcome-based" education. Aspects of this trend become closely linked with economic analyses of the schooling system, such as those offered by Chubb and Moe (1990).

There were a number of criticisms and critiques of the effective-schools approach. The most severe of these came from two quarters: those concerned about the fate of minority children in the schools, who felt that these children would be forgotten in the new drive to push for higher standards and "excellence" (e.g., Dantley, 1990; Boysen, 1992) and those concerned with the fate of teachers who worked directly in schools, who were seen to be "deskilled" and ignored by an increasingly top-down system of educational reform (e.g., Elmore, 1992). These factions, discontented

by the focus on results and apparent lack of attention to individual needs and local control, have served as the focus for a "second wave" of school restructuring efforts that have generated such ideas as "building-based management," school site councils, teacher empowerment, and action research.

Some empirical evidence for the value of these approaches has begun to emerge recently, showing, for example, that teacher satisfaction and a sense of shared community among school staff are important predictors of efficacy (Lee, Dedrick & Smith, 1991). Indications from some earlier research, however, suggest that the school effectiveness and school restructuring approaches may in fact simply be two alternative conceptions of how schools might best be organized and managed. The school effectiveness model of centrally managed change may be more productive in settings where local forces are not sufficiently powerful, well organized, or clear on what needs to be done, whereas the locally determined course of school restructuring may be more useful when local forces can in fact come to a decision about what needs to happen (Firestone & Herriott, 1982).

How to make sense of these conflicting claims for what the optimal mode of school organization might be? The school effectiveness research urges us to see human organizations as rational, manageable creations, able to be shaped and changed by careful, conscious action of a few well-intentioned administrators. The school restructuring approach, on the other hand, suggests that organizations, and schools, are best thought of as collectivities, groups of individuals who, to do their work better, need both freedom and the incentive that comes from joining with peers in search of new approaches. The first puts the emphasis on structure, central control, and rational action; the latter on individuals, community values, and the development of shared meaning.

A potential linkage between these differing conceptions is offered by James Coleman, the well-known sociologist who studied the issue of integration and school achievement in the 1960s. Coleman (1993) paints a broad picture of the rise of corporate forms of organization (including notably schools) and concomitant decline of traditional sources of values and social control (family, church). He sees a potential solution in reinvesting parents (and perhaps by extension other community agents) with a significant economic stake in their children's future productivity to the state via a kind of modified and extended voucher system. The implications are intriguing, and we will return to them later in this chapter as we discuss the possibility of a sociology of educational technology.

6.3.1.5. Educational Technology and School Organization. If we want to think about the sociological and organizational implications of educational technology as a field, we need something more than a "history of the creation of devices." Some histories of the field (e.g., Saettler, 1968) have provided just that. But while it is useful to know when certain devices first came on the scene, it would be more helpful in the larger scheme of things to know why school boards, principals, and teachers wanted to buy those devices, how educators thought about their use as they were introduced, what they were actually used for, and what real changes they brought about in how teachers and students worked in classrooms and how administrators and teachers worked together in schools and districts. It is through thousands of such decisions, reactions, perceptions, and intents that the field of educational technology has been defined.

As we consider schools as organizations, it is important to bear in mind that there are multiple levels of organization in any school: the organizational structure imposed by the state or district, the organization established for the particular school in question, and the varieties of organization present in both the classroom and among the teachers who work at the school. Certainly there are many ways of using technology that simply match (or even reinforce) existing bureaucratic patterns: districts that use e-mail only to send out directives from the central office, for example, or large-scale central computer labs equipped with integrated learning packages through which all children progress in defined fashion.

As we proceed to think about how technology may affect schools as organizations, there are three central questions we should consider. Two of these--the overall level of adoption and acceptance of technology into schools (i.e., the literature on educational innovation and change), and the impact of technology on specific patterns of organization and practice within individual classrooms and schools (i.e., the literature on roles and role change in education)have been commonplaces in the research literature on educational technology for some years. The third--organizational analysis of schools under conditions of technological change--is only now emerging.

6.3.1.5.1. The Problem of Innovation. We gain perspective on the slow spread of technology into schools from work on innovations as social and political processes. Early models of how new practices come to be accepted were based on the normal distribution; a few brave misfits would first try a new practice, followed by community opinion leaders, "the masses," and finally a few stubborn laggards. Later elaborations suggested additional factors at work: concerns about the effects of the new approach on established patterns of work, different levels of commitment to the innovation, and so on (Rogers, 1962; Hall & Hord, 1984; Hall & Loucks, 1978. See also 23.7.7, Chapter 37).

If we view technologies as innovations in teachers' ways of working, then there is evidence they will be accepted and used if they buttress a teacher's role and authority in the classroom (e.g., Godfrey, 1965, on overhead projectors), and disregarded if they are proposed as alternatives to the teacher's presence and worth (e.g., early televised instruction, programmed instruction in its original Skinnerian garb; Cuban, 1986). Computers and related devices seem to fall somewhere in the middle: They can be seen as threats to the teacher, but also as belpmates and liberators from drudgery (Kerr, 1991). Attitudes on the parts of teachers and principals toward the new technology have been well studied, both in the past and more recently regarding computers (e.g., Honey & Moeller, 1990; Pelgrum, 1993). But attitude studies, as noted earlier, rarely probe the significant issues of power, position, and changes in the organizational context of educators' work, and the discussion of acceptance of technology as a general stand-in for school change gradually has become less popular over the years. Scriven (1986), for example, suggested that it would be more productive to think of computers not simply as devices but rather as new sources of energy within the school, energy that might be applied in a variety of ways to alter teachers' roles.

Less attention has been paid to the diffusion of the "process technology" of the instructional development/ instructional design process. There have been some attempts to chart the spread of notions of systematic thinking among teachers, and a number of popular classroom teaching models of the 1970s (e.g., the "Instructional Theory into Practice," or ITIP, approach of Madeline Hunter) seemed closely related to the notions of ID. While some critics saw ID as simply another plot to move control of the classroom away from the teacher and into the hands of "technicians" (Nunan, 1983), others saw ID providing a stimulus for teachers to think in more logical, connected ways about their work, especially if technologists themselves recast ID approaches in a less formal way so as to allow teachers leeway to practice "high influence" teaching (Martin & Clemente, 1990; see also Shrock, 1985; Shrock & Higgins, 1990). More elaborated visions of this sort of application of both the hardware and software of educational technology to the micro- and macro-organization of schools include Reigeluth and Garfinkle's (1992) depiction of how the education system as a whole might change under the impact of new approaches (see also Kerr, 1989a, 1990a).

6.3.1.5.2. Studies of Technology and Educational Roles. What has happened in some situations with the advent of contemporary educational technology is a quite radical restructuring of classroom experience. This has not been simply a substitution of one model of classroom life for another but rather an extension and elaboration of what is possible in classroom practice. The specific elements involved are several: greater student involvement in project oriented learning and increased learning in groups, a shift in the teacher's role and attitude from being a source of knowledge to being a coach and mentor, and a greater willingness on the parts of students to take responsibility for their own learning. Such changes do not come without costs; dealing with a group of self-directed learners who have significant resources to control and satisfy their own learning is not an easy job. But the social relationships within classrooms can be significantly altered by the addition of computers and a well-developed support structure. (For further examples of changes in teachers' roles away from traditional direct instruction and toward more diverse arrangements, see Davies, 1988; Hardy, 1992; Hooper, 1992; Hooper & Hannafin, 199 1; Kerr, 1977, 1978; Laridon, 1990a, 1990b; McIlhenny, 199 1; also 6.3.5. 1. For a discussion of changes in the principal's role, see Wolf, 1993.)

Indeed, the evolving discussion on the place of ID in classroom life seems to be drawing closer to more traditional sociological studies of classroom organization and the teacher's role. One such study suggests that a "more uncertain" technology (in the sense of general organization) of classroom control can lead to more delegation of authority, more "lateral communication" among students, and increased effectiveness (Cohen, Lotan & Leechor, 1989). The value of intervening directly in administrators' and teachers' unexamined arrangements for classroom organization and classroom instruction was affirmed in a study by Dreeben and Barr (1988).

6.3.1.5.3. The Organizational Impact of Educational Technology. If the general conclusion of some sociologists (as noted above) that the organizational effects of technology are best observed on the microlevel of classrooms, offices, and interpersonal relations, rather than the macrolevel of district and state organization, then we would be well advised to focus our attention on what happens in specific spheres of school organizational life. It is not surprising that most studies of educational technology have focused on classroom applications, for that is the image that most educators have of its primary purpose. Discussions of the impact of technology on classroom organization, however, are rarer. Some empirical studies have found such effects, noting especially the change in the teacher's role and position from being the center of classroom attention to being more of a mentor and guide for pupils. This shift, however, is seen as taking significantly longer than many administrators might like, typically taking from 3 to 5 years (Kerr, 1991; Hadley & Sheingold, 1993; see also 13.6.7, 14.8.2).

Some models of application of technology to overall school organization do suggest that it can loosen bureaucratic structures (Hutchin, 1992; Keff, 1989b; McDaniel, McInerney & Armstrong, 1993). Examples include the use of technology to allow teachers and administrators to communicate more directly, thus weakening existing patterns of one-way, top-down communication; and networks linking teachers and students, either within a school or district, or across regional or national borders, thus breaking the old pattern of isolation and parochialism and leading to greater collegiality (Tobin & Dawson, 1992). Linkages between schools, parents, and the broader community have also been tried sporadically, and results so far appear promising

There have been some studies that have focused on administrators, changed patterns of work with the advent of computers. Kuralt (1987), for example, described a computerized system for gathering and analyzing information on teacher and student activity. Special educators have been eager to consider both instructional and administrative uses for technology, with some seeing the potential to facilitate the Often-cumbersome processes of student identification and placement through better application of technology (Prater & Ferrara, 1990). Administrators concerned about facilitating contacts with parents have also found solutions using technology to describe assignments, provide supportive approaches, and allow parents to communicate with teachers using voice mail (Bauch, 1989). However, improved communication does not necessarily lead to greater involvement, knowledge, or feelings of "ownership" on the parts of educators. In a study of how schools used technology to implement a new budget planning process in school-based management schools, Brown (1994) found that many teachers simply did not have the time or the training needed to participate meaningfully in budget planning via computer.

6.3.1.5.4. Educational Technology and Assumptions about Schools as Organizations. 'Mere is clearly no final verdict on the impact educational technology may have on schools as organizations. In fact, we seem to be faced with competing models of both the overall situation in schools and the image of what role educational technology might play there. On the one hand, the advocates of a rational systems view of school organization and management--effective-schools devotees--would stress technology's potential for improving the flow of information from administration to teachers, and from teachers to parents, for enabling management to collect more rapidly a wider variety of information about the successes and failures of parts of the system as they seek to achieve well-defined goals.

A very different image would come from those enticed by the vision of school restructuring. They would likely stress technology's role in allowing wide access to information, free exchange of ideas, and the democratizing potentials inherent in linking schools and communities more closely.

Is one of these images more accurate than the other? Hardly, for each depends on a different set of starting assumptions. The rational-systems adherents see society (and hence education) as a set of more or less mechanistic linkages, and efficiency as a general goal. Technology, in this vision, is a support for order, rationality, and enhanced control over processes that seem inordinately "messy." The proponents of the "teledemocracy" approach, on the other hand, are more taken by organic images, view schools as institutions where individuals can come together to create and recreate communities, and are more interested in technology's potential for making the organization of the educational system not necessarily more orderly, but perhaps more diverse.

These images and assumptions, in turn, play out in the tasks each group sets for technology: monitoring, evaluation, assurance of uniformity (in outcomes if not methods), and provision of data for management decisions on the one hand; communication among individuals, access to information, diversification of the educational experience, and provision of a basis on which group decisions may be made, on the other. We shall discuss the implications of these differences further in the concluding section.