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to HomepageIn "Educational Computing: Learning with Tomorrow's Technologies", Maddux, Johnson, and Willis (1997) describe Streibel's (1991) comment on critical theory as follows:
Streibel is critical of computers in education. He limits his analysis to three ways computers can be used in education: "the drill-and-practice approach, the tutorial approach, and the simulation and programming approach." Then he concludes that a common framework "runs throughout the three approaches." the common framework is based on behavioral learning theory. All Streibel's arguments against using computers in education relate to the three uses he selected. Drill and practice programs "represent a very one-dimensional form of education because they restrict the goal structures, reward structures, and meaning structures of educational events to the domain of educational productivity... [and] therefore constitute a deterministic form of behavioral technology." Computer-based tutorial programs "are biased against experiential learning (outside of the technological framework), quantum leaps in learning, and reflective thinking. their value in education is therefore very limited." In commenting on programming and simulations Streibel believes:
Computers tend to legitimize those types of knowledge that fit into their framework and delegitimize other types of knowledge.... Hence, computers tend to legitimize the following characteristics of knowledge...: rule-governed order, objective systematicity, explicit clarity, non-ambiguity, non-redundancy, internal consistency, non-contradiction (i.e., logic of the excluded middle), and quantitative aspects. They also tend to legitimize deduction and induction as the only acceptable epistemological methods.
By way of contrast, computers tend to delegitimize the following characteristics of knowledge...: emergent goals, self-constructed order, organic systematicity, connotation and tacitness, ambiguity, redundancy, dialectical rationality, simultaneity of multiple logics, and qualitative aspects. And finally, they tend to delegitimize the following epistemological methods: abduction, interpretation, intuition, introspection, and dialectical synthesis of multiple and contradictory realities. (p. 317)
