This paper will draw its findings from a recent study (Lloyd, 2003) which sought to identify the cultural myths of the computer in the classroom through a case study of computer education in Queensland state schools from 1983 to 1997. This was a period marked by its consecutive, discrete, high-profile and politically-motivated projects to put computers in classrooms. The emergent myths were categorised within their source metanarratives and were also positioned within a critical cultural framework. The term "computer education" is given to mean any curricular or classroom-based use of computers. This study addressed a hitherto neglected area of educational research by looking beyond the rhetoric and highlighting where policy decisions have been made on the basis of mythic assumptions. The identification of the cultural myth(s) in this study was essentially a process of looking for shadows. Finding the twenty-seven pervasive myths which initiated and sustained the systemic policies, infrastructure programs and curricular decisions of the period under review involved rigorous processes of deconstruction, reconstruction, analysis and synthesis. The data sources were contemporary policy documents, Hansard entries, press releases and media statements, correspondence and interviews with stakeholders while the methodology employed was an adaptation of Descriptive Interpretational Analysis (Tesch, 1990)
