Technologies do not follow some predetermined and inevitable course from their context of production to their context of use, and technologies used in schools are no exception. Rather, technologies and their use in the classroom are socially contextualised. They are often appropriated in ways unanticipated by their developers, locking into institutional arrangements and reflecting elements of the prevailing social relations in and around the particular context(s) of application. Through the discussion of a particular technology (the Logo programming language) as a case study in educational innovation, this article demonstrates how the use of technologies in schools is socially shaped. The paper looks into the place that Logo occupied within the institutional and organisational cultures of US and UK mainstream schools after its introduction in the early 1980s. It discusses the ways in which Logo was received in the educational arena and was implicated in the politics of educational innovation at a time of conservative restoration.
Logo" is the name for a philosophy of education and for a continually evolving family of computer languages that aid its realization. Developed in the US in the late 1960s, it became the material embodiment of a radical educational philosophy and a potential vehicle for the transformation of education. In the early 1980s, Logo was introduced into mainstream education in both the US and the UK. Within an increasingly conservative social and political context with different education policy priorities, Logo was gradually stripped of its radical potential, marginalized and, where it survived, remoulded as harmless to the mainstream educational system. This paper draws on empirical research which explored the evolution of Logo between the late 1960s and the late 1990s. The paper focuses on the social processes involved in the initial development and evolution of Logo. It shows that these processes were heavily contested. It demonstrates that Logo was the product of complex social, technical, political and economic decisions, and the product of negotiation shaped by the concerns of the social players involved. It shows that the evolution of Logo was not linear or even primarily technical. Rather, that it was a seamless web in which the technical was interwoven with the social, economic and political in ways that illustrate the dialectical interaction between historical contingency and the intentions and aspirations of individuals and communities.
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