Page 112 - Education in a Digital World

Local Variations 99

of the official sanctioning of internet-based content in schools, with the Singaporean
government maintaining close control over what can and what cannot be accessed
online in terms of internet censorship across all sectors of society. More subtle is
the governmental direction of the language used in technology-based teaching
and learning. Aside from studying five or six periods of Chinese a week, all
secondary school lessons are required to be taught in standard forms of English
(Chai et al. 2009). Government and educational authorities are therefore keen to
promote technology-based learning in standard English – thus ignoring content
in the English-based form of ‘Singlish’ creole that is spoken and written
colloquially by nearly all Singaporean adults, young people and children. In all these
ways, what Singaporean teachers and students do with digital technology
inside their classrooms is qualitatively and quantitatively different from what they
are likely to be doing outside school. All these issues can therefore be seen to
contribute to a situation where digital technology is used within schools in a
restrained and ‘artificial’ manner. Whereas the official policies have undoubtedly
facilitated the central presence of technology within Singaporean education, the
local politics of technology use and non-use remain more complex and certainly
more compromised.

Why Robot? The Case of Educational Robotics in Japan

A more esoteric example of the local shaping of education and technology can
be found in the on-going efforts in Japan (and to a lesser extent South Korea
and Taiwan) to develop roboticised teachers and teaching assistants. Indeed, the past
twenty years have seen a growing interest amongst Japanese technologists in
the design and implementation of ‘real’ humanoid robots that coexist and interact
with human beings in the home and in the workplace. Over half of the world’s
industrial robots can now be found in Japan, and while currently prevalent mainly
in heavily urbanised areas it is predicted that each Japanese household will be
home to at least one robot by the end of the 2010s – the domestic side of
what some commentators see as an impending ‘robotic moment’ in humanity (see
Turkle 2011). Alongside the popular categories of ‘entertainment’ and ‘compa-
nionship’, many of the 60 or so currently available types of household robots have
been designed specifically to function as ‘human sector’ service employees – i.e.
fulfilling functions in nursing, child-care, cleaning, security and surveillance.
As such, the notion of the ‘teaching robot’ is an obvious combination of many of
these functions.
Early efforts such as the ‘IROBI’ robotic teaching assistants were relatively
rudimentary – little more than machines with monitors in their midriffs that stu-
dents could interact with. Yet the 2000s saw the development of more deliberately
‘humanised’ teacher robots, typified by the ‘Saya’ robot. Originally designed as a
receptionist robot, the teacher version of Saya was designed to resemble a female
primary teacher – with fully prosthetic rubberised face and hands, skirt suit, brown