Welcome to Cyberschool - David Trend

Welcome to Cyberschool is a book about two highly charged and often emotional discussions in today's society. One concerns the optimism and promise surrounding information technologies of computers and the internet; the other involves the growing pessimism and despair about the nation's schools. These narratives of technological optimism and educational pessimism converge with increasing frequency, as school groups, community leaders, and political rivals battle each other over the best way to wire the nation's schools, computerize every classroom, and "leave no child behind." Welcome to Cyberschool is the first book-length analysis of this confluence of technology and education in the information age.

David Trend is director of the UC Insititute for Research in the Arts and chair of the Studio Art Department at the Universtiy of California, Irvine.

David Trend offers a wise, cautionary view of the current tendency to technologize education in the United States. He depicts the state of our educational system in the context of a broad and deep understanding of the impact of networked computing on politics, economics, and culture. Welcome to the Cyberschool provides an excellent view of education at a crucial turning point and is recommended reading especially to those who wish to improve our educational system.
Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine

A good text for an educational philosophy graduate seminar.
CHOICE

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. These are ultimately important questions that are rarely heard in the educational arena.
Afterimage

This book should be seen as essential background reading on the subject.
Times Educational Supplement

The book is provocative and challenging. David Trend writes with passion and zeal. Readers everywhere will find much on which to reflect.
British Journal of Educational Technology

David Trend has written an important book that explodes the idealized, depoliticized, and dehistoricized space of the internet and the utopianism associated with new media technologies. By analyzing the relationship between the on-line world and the material world, Trend has revealed the information superhighway to be much more than littered with shards of broken glass and susceptible to the occasional sink hole; he has located the vast expanse of its mine fields. Traveller beware.
Peter McLaren, Honorary Chair Professor and Director of the Center for Critical Studies, Northeast Normal University, China