A school is a community, a learning community of a particular type, in which dialogue is possible (Stern 2007). Dialogue involves what Martin Buber calls ‘imagining the real’ (Realphantasie, Buber 1998, p 71), reaching out to others whilst retaining your own position. He distinguishes this form of dialogue (‘real’ or ‘genuine’ dialogue) from ‘technical’ dialogue (the exchange of information) and ‘monologue disguised as dialogue’ (Buber 2002, p 22). Dialogue amongst the current members of the school community is critical and helps determine the school’s ethos; dialogue beyond the current members of the school community is what is also needed to determine the school’s spirit (as defined in Stern 2009). The life of real dialogue involves a ‘strengthening sense of reciprocity’, whilst one of only monologue ‘will not, even in the tenderest intimacy, grope out over the outlines of the self’ (Buber 2002, p 24). Dialogue in school communities must be both internal and external to the school, outwards in space to other local, national and international communities, outwards in time to people of the past and of the future. The spirit of the school transcends the school; spirituality implies transcendence. Computing is a means of intra- and extra-institutional communication, and has in so many ways reconstructed forms of communication and community generally (see Houston 1998, Graham 1999, McKay 2004), that it cannot be overlooked in determining the spirit of the school, and the nature of schools as communities (as also in Wegerif 2007). Whatever is said about the ‘virtual worlds’ created using computers, there is a potential for reality in that virtuality, real relationships, real dialogue. A dialogic classroom can be described as a ‘fictive’ classroom (Stern 2007, p 41), a creation of the imagination: imagining the real. In this context, the extensive and still increasing use of computers in schools raises a number of questions. To what extent does, or could, computer use in schools contribute to real dialogue as understood by Buber? To what extent do, or could, the virtual environments created using computers (e.g. virtual reality games, simulations, social networking environments, as well as the ‘networked communities’ created simply through the use of email) have a ‘reality’? What are the moral, social and religious implications of computer use for dialogue and the nature of school communities?

Following extensive research and professional writing on ICT in schools (e.g. Stern and Lamey 1999, Stern and Sprake 1999, Stern 2000a, b, 2003a, b), this paper reports an analysis of the ‘reality’ (as in ‘real dialogue’ or ‘imagining the real’) of computer use in schools, as an attempt to conceive schools as communities of the form of households, straddling the traditional distinction between public and private organisations. The research responds to one small surprise in a larger research project (The Spirit of the School, with initial findings published in Stern 2009), which involved extensive interviews and other activities with 144 pupils, teachers and headteachers in 13 schools in the UK and in Hong Kong. The surprise was that there was almost no mention of computers or computer-mediated communication in any of the responses. This paper reports analysis of the possible significance of ICT in schools as dialogic communities.

The Spirit of the School surprise finding suggested that computing had not ‘touched’ these people, despite intensive use of ICT in all the schools researched (and see also Cuban 2001, Blumberg 2008). Evidence is available of computer use that is indeed ‘touching’, most notably the negative use of computers, as in ‘cyber-bullying’ (Rivers and Noret 2007a, b), but the understanding of why and how computing can change school communities is analysed here in terms of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Buber himself wrote of the danger of technology, as a ‘golem’ (Buber 2002, p 187), and said that humanity can, through dialogue, destroy the golem at some point in the future: this is a task that adults must therefore enable through their teaching of the young. This is re-conceived, in the present paper, in terms of ICT use in schools.