Welcome to Cyberschool. - book review

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002 by John Mann

David Trend

Lanham, MD: Rowman 6 Littlefield Publishers, 2001

With a greeting that usually announces an arrival, David Trend bids us a hearty Welcome to Cyberschool. But the intonation of anything adorned with this omnipresent prefix will obviously not let us dwell for long. Like any technological advance that has announced the future, from the steam engine to the silicon chip, there is a premonition of change and passing in every greeting, an immediacy of goodbye. Trend's book sets out to question the speed of obsolescence within the current climate of information exchange and the unequivocally optimistic promises it extends. Much like the steam engine fired up the industrial revolution and enabled the widespread trade of goods and information, the Internet and computer culture seen today provide accelerated outlets for similar exchanges. The online communities formed in the process have altered the social framework, and Trend argues that they are constituted by an increasingly uniform commonality.

From this departure point, Welcome to Cyberschool takes on the overwhelming promises made by educators, politicians and corporations regarding the value of technology in the schools. Trend notes that while discussions flare over issues such as school vouchers, standardized testing and prayer in the schools, the move toward comprehensive use of technology in education is largely an uncontested direction that rarely engages a critical debate. It appears as if the future of technology in schools is pre determined, and any suggestion otherwise implies an unwillingness to accept the road ahead. The problems faced by today's educational system seem easily patched by a technological fix, a solution, which, the author feels, has allowed for disastrous effects. Looking back to earlier introductions of media in education, such as the use of film and video, Trend follows a path where education "reformers" believed these methods allowed for greater information recognition and a broader educational experience. While these media did offer some ease in instruction and a new educational experience, Trend suggests that they also provided a "one-directional, nondialogical, transmission" and led to a drastic reduction of labor. Current technologies have exacerbated the "digital divide," the widening gap between those with access to technology and those left out of cyberspace. Trend writes, "...there is a need to recognize the many moments throughout history that people have been misled into thinking that technology alone is a solution...."

The real value of Trend's book is that it offers an arsenal of questions for the technological age, pinpointing the assumed community of the Internet and the frantic application of new technologies into today's schools. While it sometimes slows down the pace of its own argument by employing repetitious data, these are ultimately important questions that are rarely heard in the educational arena. Trend's frame of reference comes not from a fear of what technology can offer (there is no doubt in his words that he believes in the power of what it can do), but instead he tries to mediate the rush toward the constantly deferred technological frontier by suggesting that something new does not necessarily mean something better.

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