In these books, Warschauer critiqued previous views of computer-assisted language learning, which often emphasized tutorials of grammar and vocabulary, and instead articulated a vision of global citizenship and agency through online communication and research.
Warschauer's book Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide, and his numerous articles on the same topic, including one in Scientific American, critiqued the traditional view of the digital divide as focused narrowly on hardware and software, and instead illustrated how social relations, human capital, culture and language were all critical for shaping people's access to and use of new information and communication technologies.
The book was based on Warschauer's research on technology, education, and social development projects in Egypt, Brazil, China, India, and the United States.
Though mostly a positive account, it includes enough negative examples to illustrate a point central to all of Warschauer's work, that of technology as intellectual and social amplifier.
Warschauer served as a faculty researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi, where he published several of his early books and also organized two seminal international symposia on technology and language learning.
While at the University of Hawaiʻi, Warschauer also founded and edited Language Learning & Technology, one of the first peer-reviewed academic journals published on the World Wide Web.