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"With the development of informational capitalism and the network society, globalization and informatization play an increasingly crucial role for understanding technology and society. Informatization describes a qualitative leap in technology development which opens up new dimensions of productivity by information modelling on the one hand, but which demands new forms of knowledge of information workers on the other hand. Work is becoming more flexible, but also more precarious and more polarized socially. These tendencies create a contradictory situation for the subject: formalization and new scopes of autonomy exist side by side. This constellation allows for new approaches to the social shaping of technologies. But they presuppose a
fundamental change in attitude by both, system developers and social scientists." (author's abstract)

Two decades ago, people used computers as an information resource for many fields. These fields include library information, climatic information, medicine, transportation schedules, banking, and other areas. The use of international networks at that time enabled people to communicate globally in a rapid and accurate fashion not only to experts, but to the public also. In regions such as South and Central America, however, the uses of information resources were not as widespread as they were in developed countries. Indeed, estimates showed that Latin America contained two percent of the world's informatics equipment. At that time, computers appeared in commercial and governmental agencies as well as universities that used global networks such as the internet, BITNET, FidoNet, and other similar networks. In the mid-1980s, of course, the world wide web was only a dream and the individual use of computers was almost non-existent. The emergence of web-based technology in the 1990s caused a worldwide transformation in the use of computers and their applications, particularly in Latin America. Their natural associations with Spain and Portugal and their strong desire to be at the forefront of informatics changes, Latin American countries developed a new resurgence – a small renaissance – thrusting many of these countries into a modern technical society with accelerated growth and educational promise. This panel attempts to emphasize the progress of computing in representative Spanishspeaking countries and to celebrate the computing achievements made there. The distinguished panelists will bring forward ways in which computing had emerged and the way the computing evolution affected computing education in the regions. The summaries of their dialogue follow. ; 2nd IFIP Conference on the History of Computing and Education ; Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI)