On Socialization of Personal Computing

Education is a typical activity of collaboration, i.e., collaboration among instructors and students. While there have been vast amount of trials using computers in the classroom, their success is quite limited compared with total activities done in school education. The reasons of the limited success may be the cost of introducing computers into the classroom, lack of adequate software, or lack of specialists. In this paper, the authors would like to propose another hypothetical reason. That is, limit of the ´personal computing´ as a media in the context of classroom where peoples´ activities are more social and collaborative using rich media such as verbal and non-verbal communication in the face-to-face environment. Based on this hypothesis, the authors propose a research plan of extending the concept of personal computing to more social media that matches collaboration in the face-to-face environment.