Interestingly, very few of the speakers who used the history of television as a parallel to emergence of computer technology in the classroom seemed to note the distinction between television as a broadcast medium and computer-mediated technology as a dialogic, communicative medium. Similarly, most of the presenters who drew connections between television and computers in education tended to treat educational computer use as fairly ahistorical--merely a recent trend in composition instruction (when in fact attempts to integrate computers in writing classes have been going on since the 1960s). Perhaps we can learn from past attempts to integrate new technologies in educational instruction, but I think it would behoove us to make clearer distinctions between the socio-historical situations of these past technologies and the technologies we are currently using in our classes (with much more success than television, I might add.)