In what follows I examine the distribution of these perspectives throughout the debate on the impact of information technology on US education, point out some of the problems with some of the arguments as they stand, and articulate an alternative response. As a teacher who is committed to introducing my students to new technologies and the issues posed by them, I am nevertheless concerned at what I see as a certain lack of responsibility in the claims being made for their introduction into the classroom, and in the theoretical constructs being used to elaborate an information pedagogy.
Many of the arguments for the educational role of new informational technologies are based upon a refusal of the problems posed by a number of material bodies (flesh and blood, bodies politic, corporate bodies, bodies of knowledge) in favour of the construction of a "virtual" body of pure information that will nevertheless bring about a number of progressive social aims (giving voice to disenfranchised groups, the democratization of education, greater provision of knowledge throughout society). In order to highlight the importance of these various material bodies and to indicate the degree to which the domain of information technology is not as disembodied as it first appears I have adopted two paradigms, one very old, the other more recent.
Using the metaphor of medieval alchemy I point out that the dream of escaping from material constraints via new technology is in fact a very old one; nevertheless the attitude toward information technology that I describe as the new alchemy contains a few distinctively modern twists. I also employ alchemy as a reminder of the way in which the rational and irrational are inextricably bound together, in our interactions with technology as in so many other aspects of life. In a more modern framework I employ the work of Donna Haraway who tries in her own response to information technology to resist a number of standard moves employed by traditional progressive and oppositional politics that serve merely to reinscribe the oppressive Western values and narratives they claim to oppose: origin stories, "seductions to organic wholeness," and an assortment of totalizing theory assumptions (150-51).
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