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150 So Where Now?

capital and the hegemonic neo-liberal project, we therefore need to be careful to
understand ‘educational technology’ within the dialectic of the global and the local.
As Arnove (2007, p.1) reminds us, “although there are common problems – and
what would appear to be increasingly similar education agendas – regional, national
and local responses also vary”.
Of course, it is important to note that often these local responses and rearrange-
ments can be highly divisive and disempowering for many people. Indeed, often
these local responses are part of on-going processes of struggle and friction where
some people continue to win and many others continue to lose. For example,
Rwanda’s extensive and ambitious plans for a nationwide information and com-
munications infrastructure do not make the country any less excluded from global
power than before. The rise of teaching robots in Japan is clearly constrained by the
wider industrial, cultural and gendered politics of Japanese society. Similarly, the
benefits of initiatives such as the ‘Hole-in-the-wall’ or ‘One Laptop Per Child’
could not be said to extend to all individuals, despite the democratic aspirations of
such projects. There are simply too many other mitigating circumstances that
remain in place for educational technology to ever make a clear-cut difference to
societal arrangements. Instead, it often appears that the most dominant powerful
contexts are those that are more able to shape educational technology to fit their
needs best. So while not being wholly defeatist when looking forward to the future,
it is important to be realistic about the uneven nature of even the most localised and
most ‘appropriate’ forms of educational technology provision and practice.
Aside from the inherent inequalities of digital technology use in education,
another key issue to emerge from this book’s analysis is the range of inter-related
and often competing interests involved in shaping educational technology. It is
therefore worth taking time to reflect further on these interests and the roles they
play in the global construction of educational technology. When doing so, how-
ever, it is important to note that no one set of actors and interests could be said to
dominate the shaping of educational technology. As many of this book’s chapters
have illustrated, power and influence is distributed unevenly throughout different
sets of actors at different times and in different contexts. For example, whereas a
company such as Cisco assumes an influential role in the educational technology
arrangements in some sub-Saharan African school systems, this power is not con-
sistent across all countries in the world, or even across all countries in Africa.
As such, we should concur with Zygmunt Bauman’s observation of contemporary
society that “no decision-making agency is able to plead full (that is unconstrained,
indivisible, unshared) sovereignty, let alone claim it credibly and effectively”
(Bauman 2010, p.121).
So which actors and interests can be said to influence educational technology
around the world? First and foremost, much of what has been reviewed in this
book suggests that there are good grounds for continuing to frame educational
technology within the context of the nation state. Indeed, looking back over the
past seven chapters there is little evidence to suggest a dramatic decline of state