As personal computers have become more available, there has been a great deal of optimism for educational reform through wide computer use, both at school and in the home. Beyond Technology's Promise, first published in 1994, takes a hard look at the home computer scene. The research reported in the book focuses on whether families are using computers to help children learn academic skills and, if so, how well they are doing it. The three year, qualitative investigation provides contextual information crucial to our understanding of how computers are really being used. The authors draw the not so surprising conclusion that most children use computers to play games. They therefore propose directions that must be taken in order to facilitate the educational use of home computers or any other promising educational technology. In so doing, they examine such topics as parental leadership, the home-school computer connection, and the role of gender in home computing use.

As personal computers have become more available, there has been a great deal of optimism for educational reform through wide computer use, both at school and in the home. Beyond Technology's Promise, first published in 1994, takes a hard look at the home computer scene. The research reported in the book focuses on whether families are using computers to help children learn academic skills and, if so, how well they are doing it. The three year, qualitative investigation provides contextual information crucial to our understanding of how computers are really being used. The authors draw the not so surprising conclusion that most children use computers to play games. They therefore propose directions that must be taken in order to facilitate the educational use of home computers or any other promising educational technology. In so doing, they examine such topics as parental leadership, the home-school computer connection, and the role of gender in home computing use.

DRAWN PARALLELS By JoAnne Bauer, Ph.D. Coining the term poemoir to describe her book, prize-winning author JoAnne Bauer tells stories from her life in this two-part collection of narrative and lyric richness. Her past surfaces deftly and often humorously, through complex layers of poetic imagery and memory. This ekphrastic project provides thought-enriching overlays and echoings, as Bauer references work of master artists, musicians, philosophers and other literary folks, as well as offering her original mixed media collages and altered photographs. In five sections, we travel with her --from a sheltered childhood into armored feminism and past the twists and turns of loves vicissitudes, emerging into good-natured fun and transformed by earned wisdom, ready to reckon with mortality s abrupt shortcomings. From the immediacy of captured details, her personal and unique path flowers into universal revelations about a woman s life fully lived."