1.3 Literature Review
One valuable approach to understanding the complex problem of introducing computers into education
has been to conduct a detailed survey of the issues that have emerged through past attempts to
introduce them into education. This method does not provide a sufficient foundation for
recommendations about future efforts, but it does provide a strong foundation from which
to start looking for new problems.
It is especially important to establish how the educational, technical and ultimately
organizational contexts come together in actual courseware production. The review of
past efforts is not necessarily the best description of processes to use in the future.
As the new networked computing paradigm dawns in the educational arena, many of the older
practices which are taken for granted today should be reexamined. The purpose of this
research was to explore how older themes that characterized previous educational computing
initiatives become intertwined with unique new problems that are a function of advanced
educational computing technology. Success in exploiting the potential of advanced educational
computing systems that are currently emerging could depend upon how well we learn lessons from
the practices of those who have already experimented with them.