Page 110 - Education in a Digital World

Local Variations 97

to curfews and military restrictions on travel between work and home. Individuals
in some countries faced intermittent internet access and frequent electricity
‘brownouts’. Other individuals’ experiences were shaped by their ‘translocal’ life-
styles – i.e. having to live significantly in more than one location and therefore
often having to learn online while in transit around the world. Thus behind all
these learners’ experiences of technology-based learning were a range of contextual
influences – from matters of (im)mobility and geo-politics through to variations in
income and social class. As Andrew Brown (2009, p.1166) has also observed,
“online courses in virtual settings are as much party to the play of pedagogic,
social and cultural identities as any localized, located and demarcated face-to-face
educational programme”.
Clearly, then, at the level of the individual learner, even the most ‘inter-
nationalised’ and ‘virtual’ instances of technology-based education provision are
party to a host of local reinterpretations and cultural re-mediations. These issues are
perhaps even more pronounced at the level of educational technology provision
within national systems of education. It therefore makes sense to consider how
the local shaping of education and technology is manifest in the offline physical
contexts of national educational systems. This can be seen, for example, in two
very different examples of educational technology implementation in Singapore and
in Japan.

The Realities of Digital Technology Use with Singapore’s
School System
As outlined in Chapter 4, one of the most supposedly successful cases of
system-wide educational technology implementation is that of Singapore. At first
glance, Singapore is an exemplary example of nationwide educational technology
reform, with the increased provision of digital technology coinciding with a resur-
gence of Singaporean education. Indeed, Singapore is now considered to have one
of the best public school systems in the world, with its students ranking regularly
near the top of international test results in mathematics and science. Yet these suc-
cesses notwithstanding the actual uses of digital technology in Singaporean schools
are modest. Despite the high levels of technological resourcing and access, growing
numbers of Singaporean commentators are beginning to acknowledge that
the infusion of digital technology into the country’s school system “has not really
transformed traditional classroom practice” (Chai et al. 2009, p.125). As Toh and
So (2011, p.349) conclude: “the use of technology in [Singaporean] education
remains sporadic and disjointed. The promise that technology will bring
deep-seated changes in the way that educators teach and students learn remains,
disappointedly, elusive”.
This disparity is best understood in the light of a number of local contextual
issues – not least Singapore’s distinctly ‘authoritarian/communitarian’ society.
Singapore is best described as an ‘electoral autocracy’ or ‘semi-democracy’, with the