Page 100 - Education in a Digital World

Local Variations 87

forms and functions are shaped by the societies that absorb them, even as they
influence those societies”. As many other academic accounts of general media and
technology development have shown, these shaping features can include the influ-
ence of local cultures and contexts through to issues of language, religion and other
structured forms of social relations. What significance, then, do these ‘local’ issues
have for the development and implementation of educational media and technology?
With these issues in mind, the remainder of this chapter is devoted to exploring the
localised realities of digital technology use in education.

Evidence and Indicators of Differences in ‘Educational
Technology’ between Countries

We first need to consider the extent and nature of differences in educational tech-
nology use between countries. Before we can draw any conclusions regarding why
differences may exist, it makes sense to have a clear picture of the nature and extent
of these differences. Here, then, we can turn to the succession of comparative
indicators and measures of educational technology use that have been produced
around the world during the past thirty years. A considerable number of interna-
tional surveys and studies have been conducted throughout this time, produced by
organisations as diverse as the ‘Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of
Quality in Education’ to the ‘Southern and East Africa Consortium for Monitoring
Educational Quality’. All these studies and indicators have sought to map the rise of
digital technology use throughout educational systems and, in so doing, are a valu-
able means of highlighting the variations that exist between and within countries.
Of course, these studies have tended to concentrate on similar sets of indicators – not
least ‘student to computer ratios’, the percentage of schools with internet con-
nectivity and various measures of actual usage of technology. Yet while the absolute
numbers behind these analyses may have changed over the past three decades, the
persistence of relative differences and variations suggest that educational technology
is far from a globally converging phenomenon.
Perhaps the most sustained of these datasets has been the succession of measure-
ments produced by the IEA (the International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement). This international cooperative of government research
agencies and national research institutions is best known for its comparative measure
of school system outputs – the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and
Science) study. However, the organisation has also conducted studies of digital
technology use in education over the past twenty-five years, from the ‘CompEd’
surveys in the 1980s and 1990s through to the ‘SITES’ projects during the 2000s
and 2010s. The initial IEA ‘Computers in Education’ study collected data between
1989 and 1992 to produce a comparative picture of computer use in twenty-three
countries and regions from India to British Columbia. These surveys sought to
document the ‘rapid changes’ across all of the participating education systems in
terms of access to computers at all levels of schooling. As the survey co-ordinators