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So Where Now? 155

the power imbalances that currently beset educational technology provision and
practice – i.e. conceptualising alternative models to the mainstream forms of tech-
nology arrangements that presently dominate education settings around the world.
Of course, identifying alternative arrangements that are able to affect significant
transformations of power relations is an almost impossible task – although this is no
reason not to try. Indeed, having spent most of our time detailing the problems of
educational technology around the world, we should now turn our attention
towards suggesting some potential areas of beneficial change. So how can the
international inequalities that have accompanied educational technology throughout
the past thirty years be resisted and disrupted? How can hitherto oppressed indivi-
duals and groups be supported to ‘make their own history’ and develop engaged
visions of educational technology where everyone can actively participate in altering
power relations? It is with these substantial questions that we shall now conclude
our discussion.

Education and Technology: Looking towards Local Solutions
Constructing plausible suggestions for the reshaping of educational technology use
along ‘better’, fairer and more equitable lines is no easy task. Inspiration can be
drawn, however, from the recurring discussions throughout the book that have all
pointed to increasing the role given to local sources of knowledge and expertise. As
such, an important initial step is to scale down our language and expectations for
digital technology – avoiding the hyper-narrative of a ‘global educational technol-
ogy’ and instead developing mini-narratives and localised appeals. This involves
‘relocating’ the idea of educational technology away from the globalised discourses
that currently dominate discussions and, instead, attempting to ‘educate the local’
and stress the counter-educational possibilities of more modest forms of digital
technology use. Of course, in doing this we should not over-romanticise the agency
of those who are located at local rather than global levels. Nevertheless, such a
localised turn could involve a number of re-arrangements of educational technology
that “create institutional forms that are much more responsive to oppressed and
marginalised people, and that redefine what counts as legitimate knowledge all at
the same time” (Apple 2010, p.198).
There are a number of ways that such localisations could be achieved. Clearly,
these shifts can only be achieved if steps are taken to make educational technology a
more political issue than it is at present. Much of what has been covered so far in
this book relates to the limited ways that the idea of educational technology as a
discursive construction have been expressed. We have seen, for example, how
educational technology remains an area of society that is generally unchallenged,
un-critiqued and un-problematised. Behind the broad slogans of ‘twenty-first-century
skills’, ‘digital-natives’ and so on, popular debates and public understandings move
very rarely beyond what Vincent Mosco (2004) termed ‘the digital sublime’– i.e.
the commonly accepted myths concerning the revolutionary potential of