Page 137 - Education in a Digital World

124 International Development

Quaghebeur (2005) remind us, the forms of ‘participation’ and ‘inclusion’ that are
promised through any political intervention are often based on official ‘supply-side’
needs and assumptions. For example, many of the initiatives outlined in this chapter
purport to promote the increased and active involvement of people in activities and
decisions that concern their lives. Yet often these official notions of ‘participation’
and involvement’ can be seen as conforming to official expectations of what it is to
learn productively or to gain skills related to the contemporary economic order. In
other words, it could be argued that under many forms of educational ICT4D the
individual ‘participant’ is not actively self-determining (and self-empowering) but
submitting themselves to conform to official agendas of what it is to be a learner, a
technology-user or a future functioning member and ‘productive’ participant in the
knowledge economy. While understandable from an official point of view, it could
well be that many of these ‘socially inclusive’ benefits are not especially desirable – or
even that advantageous – for the individuals in the low-income contexts who are
supposedly being ‘developed’ and advantaged. As such, ICT4D efforts in education
could be seen as “divert[ing] attention from social and power structures that perpetuate
many forms of inequality and social exclusion” (Zembylas 2009, p.18).

Conclusions
Criticising an area of educational technology that is more socially-focused and
progressively-minded than most others may appear, at first glance, to be an unfair
and disproportionate response. Yet educational ICT4D should not be spared critical
analysis simply because of the seemingly ‘good work’ and ‘good intentions’ of many
of those involved. The mis-application of digital technologies in the context of
educational development cannot simply be excused as a case of ‘anything is better
than nothing’. Instead, ICT4D is a major element of educational technology use in
‘a digital world’, and deserves the scrutiny that has long been afforded to technology
interventions in wealthier ‘developed’ countries. In pursuing a critical approach, this
chapter has therefore highlighted a number of key themes that have also emerged
during previous chapters of the book – not least issues of power and, in particular,
the question of whose interests in which digital technologies are being developed
and introduced.
One key issue to take from the discussions in this chapter are the unbalanced
relationships between those being ‘developed’ and those responsible for the ‘devel-
oping’. As Richard Heeks argues, the majority of these innovations can still be
characterised as ‘pro-poor’ in their approach, i.e. where the innovation occurs
“outside poor communities but on their behalf”. Only a small number of innova-
tions could be said to adopt a ‘para-poor’ approach that involves working within or
alongside poor communities, adopting participative, user-engaged design processes.
Finally, an even smaller number of ICT4D initiatives could be seen as ‘per-poor’–
namely innovations that occur within and by poor communities with little or no
outside stimulus. While these latter approaches are beginning to be seen by some