By the bootstraps : teachers, grassroots computing, and educational culture in British Columbia, 1966 to 1986
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a history of computer culture in British Columbia’s (BC) education system from 1966 to 1986, a period of teacher-led, grassroots computer adoption, integration, and interpretation. As cultural artifacts, computers were more than instruments—they were symbols that held meaning for people. I first discuss what they meant in the context of the 1960s computer counterculture, where computers were interpreted as a transformative force leading to personal empowerment. This ethos sparked various computer-based cultural initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the People’s Computer Company and Community Memory, an early social network. Beliefs in accessible and convivial technologies transferred to Vancouver, BC, where activists formed a computing organization called INFACT and their own Community Memory system. By the late 1970s, INFACT members were involved in the early computer hobbyist movement, promoting microcomputers as devices for everyone to access, understand, and control. Some BC teachers were also hobbyists, and computers held a similar significance for them. Just like members of the countercultural computing movement, teachers were immersed in the social, political, and cultural currents of the Sixties. As teachers increasingly adopted a social justice orientation and progressive pedagogy, they viewed computers as a means to achieve both social and professional change. Computers would support their transformation into facilitators and curricular leaders, and lay the foundation for greater social equity. Rather than opposing computers in the classroom, as other scholars suggest in an American context, teachers led computer adoption and innovation in BC. Computers represented an opportunity to reshape the philosophy, practice, and business of education. This progressive, teacher-led culture of computing began with William Goddard in 1966, who encouraged “computers for the whole school,” and continued through the Instructional Uses of Microcomputers Pilot Project in 1980; it concluded with the Provincial Advisory Committee on Computers in 1986. This cultural history of educational computing in BC draws on a variety of primary sources, including archival documents and reports, contemporary newsletters and magazines, newspaper articles, conference recordings, and oral interviews. It is a history rooted in teacher agency and local reinterpretations of global ideas about education, technology, and power.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it