Page 170 - Education in a Digital World

So Where Now? 157

educational technology in many countries and contexts. Most educational technol-
ogy theorising, for example, comes from a very limited and decontextualised set of
sources – as can be seen in the continued bearing of twentieth-century Russian
learning theory over our conceptions of how digital technologies are used all over
the world. What would a twenty-first-century Confucian or Islamic theory of
digital learning look like? How can we challenge the Euro-American dominance of
the field of educational technology, and create expectations of the ‘expert South’
providing readymade answers to the ‘lay North’?
A further form of political action would be supporting local communities and
groups to (co)produce their own ‘appropriate’ educational technologies. This area of
intervention has certainly become more practically achievable with the shift in the
ownership of the means of technology production associated with ‘open source’
practices – moving the production of software and hardware artefacts from closed,
centralised and commercially-controlled models to more open, decentralised and
collectively governed models. These shifts are not necessarily restricted to the pro-
duction of new technologies per se, as much as the reconfiguration of existing
technologies into new forms. Inspiration can perhaps be taken from de Laet and
Mol’s (2000) description of the relatively successful adoption of the Zimbabwe Bush
Pump throughout different communities and contexts in the country. Here the
success of a particular water pump was associated with the variability of the arte-
fact – what could be termed its mutability and variability in terms of its material and
social forms. As Law and Mol (2001, p.613) explain, this technology was successful
because of its ‘configurable variance’, i.e.:

because it changes shape. Of this pump and everything that allows it to work,
nothing in particular necessarily holds in place. Bits break off the device and
are replaced with bits which don’t seem to fit. And other components –
we’re talking here both of parts of the ‘machine itself’, and the social relations
embedded in it – are added to it, components which were not in the original
design itself.

As the example of the Zimbabwe Bush Pump suggests, more consideration needs
to be given to alternative ways of imagining and then producing educational
technologies that are not imposed with rigid designs and discourses, but can be
gradually adapted and co-constructed by the local communities which wish to
make use of them.

Means of Politicising Education and Technology
Around the World
In many ways, the likely actions that are required to support the emergence of these
alternative ‘other’ forms of educational technology are highly idealistic in nature.
Of course, if any shifts of this nature are to take place, then fundamental changes