Page 10 - Education in a Digital World

Preface ix

computers in a Seoul high school raises a completely different set of issues from
observing what appear to be the same devices being used in high schools in inner-
city São Paulo or, indeed, in a classroom in rural Wales. Further sets of differences
are apparent when one reconsiders the national policy programmes and agendas in
each of these education systems. The use of any ‘digital technology’ device in any
type of educational setting in any country is therefore a complex knot of issues,
interests, actors and agendas. This book is an attempt to at least begin to make
better sense of this complexity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the key themes that emerges throughout this book
is the importance of ‘context’– not least the need to address carefully the local,
national and global contexts of educational technology. As such, this is a book that
ends up considering a range of ‘global perspectives’ rather than offering a singular
‘global perspective’. In other words, this is a book that attempts to recognise the
diversity and heterogeneity of technology use around the world rather than ped-
dling a globalist account of a unified technology-driven world order. Each of the
eight chapters take full account of the differences that exist between and within
local contexts, as well as highlighting apparent global commonalities and similarities.
One final motivation for writing this book was a desire to reintroduce a political
dimension into the academic discussions and debates that surround educational
technology. All of the book’s eight chapters have an underlying interest in the role
of culture, politics, economics and society on the production and consumption of a
range of educational technology products, practices and discourses. Crucially, I have
tried to consider all of these issues at a ‘micro’ level as well as at a ‘macro’ level of
analyses. This book therefore follows the maxim that thinking about the global
requires that we simultaneously think about the local. As a result, this is certainly not
a book that finds itself seduced wholly by rhetorics of globalisation, the ‘end of
geography’, ‘borderless worlds’ and so on. Indeed, these are arguments and issues
that the book seeks to challenge and critique whenever possible.
Despite the grand scale of all its aims and issues, I hope that the book nevertheless
retains clarity in its overall analysis. While one of the main aims of writing this book
was to problematise the universalising nature of the discourses that have come to
surround technology use in education, it is important not to be overwhelmed by
the scope and diversity of the issues that are under discussion. One of the dominant
themes that emerges by the end of this book is that while the changes associated
with educational technology may not be experienced as homogeneous processes
across the globe, there is still a clear story that can be told about education and
technology. As we shall see, this is a story that is as much as about the local as it is as
about the global; and that is as much about ideology as it is about innovation.
Neil Selwyn
London, April 2012