Confronting such complexities, historians of technology have increasingly displaced the model of linear flow with one of social construction, using the latter to show how major developments arise from independent actions by numerous people. Those actions cohere into a significant development because people base them on shared understandings of the potentialities implicit in the historical processes underway. In deciding what to do with changing conditions, educators are engaging in the social construction of a new educational system. It is coming about through a diversity of innovations taken here and there by people who share, to varying degrees, a common understanding of what potentialities arise in our world of practice with the new technologies. Social action is far less precise and predictable than programmatic action is, but it is at the same time much more implacable and consequential.
Programmatic action depends on explicit instructions.
Social action results from the shared comprehension of possibilities, in this case from the potentialities arising through the use of information technology in education. Around the world, people working with the new technologies in education are widely orienting their efforts with reference to a shared, distinctive sense of the pedagogical opportunities that these technologies make feasible. We can nurture the implementation of these possibilities through social action by bringing ideas about them to fuller awareness through reflection. Bringing ideas about implicit possibilities fully to consciousness helps combat an important drag on social action cultural lag. A common response to changing conditions, whether in education or other domains, is the passive reaction that arises with the failure to perceive the full scope of the new possibilities inherent in significant technical innovations.