Page 20 - Education in a Digital World

Developing a Global Perspective 7

reflected in the growing trend towards globalised forms of collaborative and
self-organised learning – such as the online collaborations between educators
and institutions to form ‘globally networked learning environments’ (see Starke-
Meyerring and Wilson 2008). There is now increasing enthusiasm for the use of
‘open courseware’ and ‘open educational resources’ which are concerned with
making educational materials available and reconfigurable online for no cost. There
are now many examples of these open educational arrangements (see Conole
2012) – from large professional repositories such as the UK Open University’s
‘Open Learn’ programme to volunteers from China and Taiwan translating open
source materials from North American and European universities into Mandarin
Chinese. In all these instances, high quality teaching and learning is no longer seen
to be the domain of closed educational institutions and professional communities.
As all these examples suggest, education and technology is a broad topic that
encompasses a wide range of forms and involve a wide range of interests. Yet
despite its diversity, popular discussions of educational technology are disappointingly
uniform. Indeed, the field of educational technology appears to generate a constant
level of heightened expectation about the general ability of the latest ‘new’ tech-
nology to change education for the better, regardless of context or circumstance.
Typical of this thinking, for example, is John Willinsky’s (2009, p.xi) assertion that
current forms of digital technology offer “the potential, on a global scale … towards
changing how and what the world learns”. As the CEO of News Corporation
(and investor in a number of educational technology companies) similarly reasoned:
“In putting this creative force into schools we can ensure the poor child in Manila
has the same chance as the rich child in Manhattan … the key to our future is to
unlock this potential” (Rupert Murdoch, cited in Willsher 2011).
Public proclamations of this sort exemplify the general belief amongst many
powerful interests that digital technologies lie at the heart of fundamental educational
change and renewal. One prominent discourse here is the notion of technology
sustaining a genuinely worldwide rearrangement of educational access – in John
Daniel’s (2009, p.62) words, heralding “a tectonic shift that will bring the benefits
of learning and knowledge to millions”. The notion of educational technology as a
global phenomenon is evident in the numerous celebrations of the ability of digital
technology to allow educators and educational institutions to operate in ‘borderless’
and ‘edgeless’ ways, and for individuals to enjoy unprecedented levels of meritocratic
educational opportunity. In an epistemological sense, digital technologies have been
long associated with the ‘de-territorialisation’ and ‘de-referentialisation’ of knowledge,
where knowledge has no boundaries and is free to travel around the world (see
Readings 1996). For some critical educators, digital technologies are described as
having the potential to support the development of cosmopolitan and communitarian
forms of education, “powerfully contribut[ing] to the worldwide democratization,
civic engagement and action-orientated social responsibility” of educators and edu-
cational institutions (Benson and Harkavy 2002, p.169). Other proponents are less
specific but even more fulsome in their faith in the capacity of technology to