Page 119 - Education in a Digital World

106 International Development

aspects, but less developed in others. Cuba, for example, has highly developed
education and health systems, despite being relatively disadvantaged in other areas of
society. Conversely, relatively wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are
relatively undeveloped in areas such as democratic freedom and plurality.
Any form of labelling therefore encounters a host of complex issues that cannot
be resolved in the space of these few pages alone. Indeed, there is probably no
wholly satisfactory means of delineating countries in terms of their relative eco-
nomic, political and societal development. Even the most carefully worded distinc-
tion between nations will incur some element of inaccuracy and reductionism.
Take, for instance, the differences often drawn between the ‘global South’ and the
‘global North’, the ‘industrialising’ south and ‘industrialised’ west; the ‘Occident’
and ‘Orient’; or the now unfashionable ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’. Thus the
rest of this chapter will make guarded reference to ‘low-income’ and ‘developing’
nations – while acknowledging these to be flawed terms intended only to reflect
the unequal share of global wealth that persists between these countries (Nordtveit
2010). With these semantic caveats now established, the remainder of the chapter
will go on to examine the nature of educational technology ‘elsewhere’– i.e.
beyond the privileged (over)developed settings that previous chapters have so far
mostly considered.

The Role of Technology in International Development
As we saw in Chapter 4, educational technology is a prominent policy issue for
most nations, regardless of economic or societal circumstance. Indeed, the govern-
ments of many low-income countries have introduced sophisticated national stra-
tegies and policy-programmes that purport to address the need to introduce
technology into their education systems. Yet as was also argued in Chapter 4, these
policy-programmes have proved for the most part to be symbolic and aspirational
rather than substantive and transformative. This is due, in part, to the indirect
patterns of governance between national governments and local educational
arrangements. In terms of actual change ‘on the ground’ the integration of digital
technologies into the education systems of many low-income nations is often not
driven primarily by national government policy but entwined with long-established
‘international development’ efforts on the part of state, market and international
actors. In this sense, the role of educational technology in low-income nations must
be set against the historical context of international development and aid within
these countries. As ever, educational technology is a globally connected affair – even in
the most globally peripheral contexts.
Notions of ‘international development’, ‘developmental intervention’ and ‘inter-
national aid’ have been prominent features of international relations between low-
income countries and ‘the rest-of-the-world’ since the end of the Second World
War. In official terms, development is often defined simply as the elimination of
poverty through economic growth and good governance. As this description