Essays explore how students use reading and writing after the achievement of literacy. (view table of contents)

In this age of ever more powerful computers, our ability to collect and spread knowledge is growing at an exponential rate. Far from liberating humanity, our "information exasperation", as John Willinsky describes it in this pathbreaking book, has made our ability to reach conclusions about the world around us all the more difficult. With little order to guide us through the mountains of new information in the Internet, the public, as well the sciences that have amassed such knowledge, has little confidence in its potential to change the world for the better. For example, the overload of conflicting new findings in breast cancer research has so paralyzed progress that some researchers now recommend that women stop examining themselves to avoid the psychological burden of monthly searches for this deadly disease.While some critics have condemned computers and the Internet for putting us in this age of overflow and still others have praised them for their own sake, Willinsky takes a middle ground. Using the fictitious Automata Data Corporation as the vehicle for an ingenious thought experiment, he plays out what would happen if all information collected from social science research were centralized, catalogued, and processed by one company serving the public interest. Willinsky describes in great detail how such an entity could work to fulfill the promises of the human sciences and technology.Sure to stir debate, Technologies of Knowing offers a starting point from which to rethink our understanding of our emerging "wired" world and adds new insight into how to make the uses of knowledge more democratic.

In this text, John Willinsky uses modern social issues and historical precedents to demonstrate that the social sciences can and should contribute far more to public knowledge than they have in the past. We have the technologies, Willinksy demonstrates, and need only the determination to create a public resource out of social research that can extend democratic participation and self-determination, as well as improve research's focus and public support. The book offers examples of why and how this is not only possible but necessary, in the face of knowledge-based economies and a withering public sector.

Product Description: The contributors to this collection survey key issues of gender equity in education theory and the curriculum, and also consider the inherently gendered nature of knowledge. They call for a radical change in people's view of schooling and make suggestions for the way ahead. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In examining how literature is read and interpreted - in actual classrooms - through the lenses of Matthew Arnold, F.R.Leavis, Louise Rosenblatt and Northrop Frye, Dr Willinsky finds that their influence has failed to create "the sort of articulate, outspoken literacy in students that might extend the democratic basis of community and state, and that would give students a greater stake in a literate culture"...read more

Product Description: Papers of a conference held at the Calgary Institute of the Humanities, Oct. 13-18, 1988.

Product Description: The New Literacy movement in North America and Britain, covering every stage of education from primary school to higher education, aims to go beyond the idea of functional literacy to make reading a powerful weapon by means of which students can take control of their world socially and politically...read more

Product Description: The Well-Tempered Tongue is a study of the language struggle in the modern high school. Focusing on the pressing issue of standard English, the book compares what teachers have intended in the English classes of one high school with the profound and sometimes perverse lessons the students have learned about their native tongue...read more