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Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

"Changing Economies, Changing Politics, and the Web: a Hungarian Perspective"
  by Sibylle Gruber and Eniko Csomay

Like many of the chapters in this text, Gruber and Csomay have stated their organization and their intent:

To understand how Hungarian users of new technologies are influenced by – and influence – established social, cultural, educational, and political practices, we take a close look at the historical context that influenced current approaches to education and technology. We then discuss the implementation goals for educational technologies put forth by the Hungarian Ministry of Education. Finally, we focus on a situated exploration of actual implementation strategies within specific schools in Budapest and surrounding areas. We conclude with an exploration of how the Internet, and specifically the Web, influences students’ and teachers’ perceptions of educational practices in those institutions. (22)

Gruber and Csomay begin with a description of the influence of Hungary’s political history, as first an absolutist monarchy and then as a former Soviet bloc state, on current Hungarians’ literacy practices. Hungarians experienced “decades of ‘enforced literacy’ which often focused on teaching ‘the canon’ of party politics” (31) that left many Hungarians suspicious of new literacies. Gruber and Csomay collected and evaluated individual Hungarians’ responses to actual web sites, and discovered that for “these Internet users, [. . .] the new technology [is] not [seen] as a ‘liberating’ medium but instead as just another way to increase close observation of the country’s citizens.” (32). Unlike the common, western perception of the Web as “a means to enrich, expand, or change current literacy practices,” these Hungarians perceive the Web as supporting the “established power structures” (33), and their experiences with the Web are not “automatically replacing or erasing previously held attitudes and beliefs” (40). This distrust of the Web is significantly aggravated by the economic and technological problems with connecting to the Web in Hungary: these problems ranged from expensive phone bills to connect to an ISP to limited hardware resources. Despite these problems, some Hungarian teachers and students are beginning to become Web literate, and these Web literacies are influencing some teachers to reject skills-and-drills teaching and to adopt more liberating pedagogies (42-43).