Roadblocks on the Information Highway: The IT Revolution in Japanese Education [Paperback]

Although Japanese universities have relied on information technology to resolve numerous problems, their high expectations are undermined by lags in implementing that technology. This innovative edited volume argues that lags in IT implementation in Japanese education are created by contradictory and challenging responses of the social environment. If this dialectic can be visualized as having hands, the right avidly promotes IT, while the left hand simultaneously blocks it. The result, of course, is an impasse. The issues central to this stalemate are significant because they point beyond the schools, to a broader set of problem areas in Japanese society.
The contributors toRoadblocks on the Information Highwaydiscover and discuss the contradictions inherent in Japanese society and culture as they are played out in the social contexts of IT service providers, web masters, and classroom teachers who implement IT. They then show how these contradictions indicate broader, structural problems that pervade the dynamic between Japanese education and the state and business sectors. Ultimately, in a reach that goes beyond Japan, this book examines relationships between technology and society, persuasively convincing readers that the modern age has created an inextricable link between the two.

Since Japan has promoted IT more intensively than almost any other country, and is itself a leading producer, it is telling that actual implementation has been slow. Jane Bachnik and her colleagues find the reasons not just in bureaucracy and individual intransigence, but in deeper social contradictions. The analyses in this book not only inform our understanding of IT and of Japanese society, but illuminate the relationship between culture and the pressure for practical change in any context. Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona Stlsf