India

plus

computers

a classic case in "culture change" with the sudden appearance of a foreign technology leading to new constraints/possibilities (India as a "community of practice"

at least three openings, each with their openings/possibilities, that is for ongoing deliberations about what to do next, on a continuum from the most scripted to the tightly controlled to the altogether wild

1. (N)GO and programs to make computers available to those who do not have them (new versions of the culture of poverty)
2. Corporations setting up manufacturing, engineering and service oriented work places (new YUPPIes)
3. small businesses and invidividuals getting themselves computers and beginning to use them

In each case very different configurations ("webs") of actors, their relationships, the occasions they present for each other, and thus the educations required

1. (N)GOs: governmental officials, funding agencies (often large corporations), program designers, program implementers who face targetted people, their immediate local and less local consociates.
2. Corporations: investors, executives from the initiating countries and their local counterparts (elites with elites); recruitment of local management and workers, from engineers to the people who answer the phones in calling centers; the local and less local consociates of all these people.
3. small businesses: buying, selling, marketing the services, recruiting the people to work and the people to use them (and their consociates)
   1. Payal Arora and two high school students contructing a school report on "Western Art" on the basis of suggestions from Google.

Implications for professionals: Moving beyond "program design" for those who are imagined as lacking (beyond what must be a misinterpretation of Freire), towards a new respect for the complexities of the settings being produced for new forms of ignorance requiring investigation (education).

Imginaning new ways of modeling the conditions for the production of new settings, for example on such matters like global warming, and the expansion of the role of "educators."