Page 173 - Education in a Digital World

160 So Where Now?

So what scope is there to re-orientate the actions and activities of commercial
actors away from self-interest and market-building and, instead, towards engaging
with educational technology primarily for the benefit of others? Many people
would argue that these shifts can only be achieved by publicly problematising the
educational technology activities of companies and corporations around the world.
As such, civil society and non-profit interests need to confront and challenge the
educational technology activities of corporations such as Cisco, Microsoft, Dell,
Apple and so on. Conversely, civil society and non-profit interests also need to
work with corporations to construct more democratic and less commercially interested
forms of educational technology. Transnational corporations need to be made
accountable for the limited effects of their past and present actions, and to be per-
suaded and cajoled into pursuing fairer and more appropriate forms of truly ‘socially
responsible’ corporate action. As Colin Crouch (2011, n.p.) concludes:

hope for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressing the power of cor-
porations in order to attain either an economy of pure markets or a socialist
society. Rather it lies in dragging the giant corporation fully into political
controversy.

The nature of these new actions can be broad and far reaching. For example, we could
revisit the suggestion made by the Senegalese government during the 2000s that mul-
tinational IT firms contribute to a ‘digital solidarity fund’ for less-wealthy countries
to draw upon. If managed appropriately, such redistributive actions could allow
national governments and local communities to purchase (or even produce) forms of
educational technology that they consider to best fit their circumstances. Alternatively,
commercial interests could be encouraged to think more radically about the ways in
which their IT products are distributed. For instance, it could be argued that the
most effective way of interrupting the social inequalities of the commercial market
for digital technology in developing countries involves bypassing the logic of
market forces altogether. This could see, for instance, the distribution of no-cost
rather than low-cost computers. As Fuchs and Horak suggest, in contrast to the
low-specification $100 laptop approach of OLPC, the Simputer and Classmate:

what is needed are not new business strategies, but solutions to the material
and social causes of the global digital divide as well as free advanced hardware,
infrastructure, and software that are based on open standards and copy-left
licenses. … Open source technologies have a potential to transcend market
logic, what is needed is an advanced $0 laptop with free software for people
in developing countries as well as criticism of the capitalist logic that has
caused the divide between developing and developed countries and solutions
to the social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities that underpin the
global digital divide.
(Fuchs and Horak 2008, p.113)