Page 132 - Education in a Digital World

International Development 119

became a genetic engineer in one of India’s premier laboratories found the
subject by reading the New Scientist at his hole-in-the-wall. What else could
children learn on their own, apart from the use of computers? In Hyderabad,
groups of children showed significant improvements in English pronunciation,
with just few hours of practice on their own. They used a computer and a
speech-to-text programme that had been trained in a native English accent.
In the tsunami-hit village of Kalikuppam in southern India, children with
access to a hole-in-the-wall computer taught themselves basic biotechnology,
reaching a test score of 30 per cent in just two months. They had started with
a score of zero. If Tamil-speaking children could teach themselves
biotechnology in English, on their own, how far can we go?
(Mitra 2010, p.5)

Of course, not all educational ICT4D initiatives are subject to quite these levels of
promotion and ‘spin’. Most people working within the field of ICT4D display a
degree of awareness of the generally compromised nature of any technology-rich
intervention in what are otherwise ‘technology-poor’ contexts (see Shohel and
Kirkwood 2013). Amidst the generally positive evaluation literature it is sometimes
acknowledged, for example, that digital technologies tend to be used to reinforce
established forms of education and didactic learning rather than to disrupt existing
pedagogic practices. Indeed, most people involved in ICT4D interventions
acknowledge the on-going and incremental nature of their work. As Michelle
Selinger – one of the expert group of ‘Cisco Fellows’– concluded with regard to
the recent NEPAD efforts throughout the 2000s:

while there have been some successes, salutary lessons have also been learnt,
most notably that such initiatives take longer to deliver than expected, that
there needs to be effective management and leadership, that many assumptions
about ICT and education in Africa have been proved to be invalid.
(Selinger 2009, p.240)

Despite instances of such circumspection, the general consensus remains that
educational ICT4D efforts are essentially successful and ultimately of clear benefitto
the communities and individuals that are involved. Yet if one looks beyond the
“good intentions and seemingly good projects” (Zembylas 2009, p.24), it could be
concluded that this area of educational technology is in fact largely unsuccessful in
achieving its core aims. Indeed although celebrated widely, all the initiatives covered
in this chapter could be said to have had only a marginal bearing on the economic,
political and social issues that they set out to address. Within most low-income
countries and regions over the past thirty years, substantial inequalities in people’scapa-
cities and general levels of educational participation have persisted, and in many cases
worsened. As Richard Heeks (2010) observes, even ICT4D projects that could
be said to have had an ‘impact’ in particular communities and localities have rarely