The social constructivist mode of operation for personal computing

Abstract

This paper is an exploratory investigation into how social constructivist pedagogical theories shaped the development of personal computing in the mid to late 20th century. There are two main objectives for such an investigation. The first is to highlight the contingent historical nature of the application of these pedagogical theories in the development of human-computer interaction for personal computing. The second is to show how social constructivism as a theory of knowledge that links pedagogy to democratic thinking was implemented as a ‘mode of operation’ by key early designers of personal computing technologies before being taken up and adapted as part of capitalist modes of production and distribution. This account leads us to conclude that the social constructivist mode of operation for personal computing has become a technology of the self that privileges ‘interaction for interaction’s sake’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the consequences of this conceptualisation and analysis for how we understand personal computing as public pedagogy and elaborates potential implications for future research.

Keywords

• interactivity
• personal computing
• social constructivism
• mode of operation
• public pedagogy