Page 21 - Education in a Digital World

8 Developing a Global Perspective

support universal change. As Nikki Davis reasoned in all-encompassing terms:
“If our society is to adjust to and avoid damaging turmoil, alienation, and the threat
of disintegration, then the impact and potential of information and communications
technology must be at everyone’s fingertips” (Davis 2008, p.xxxv).

Education and Technology: The Need for a
Globalised Perspective
These are all familiar and well-rehearsed portrayals of the place of digital technology
within education. In much of the prevailing discourse, digital technologies are
positioned at the heart of impending worldwide change and societal reorganisation,
with educational technology assumed to be stimulating global transformations of
education and learning. Whether this is the case or not remains a central concern of
this book. Yet for the time being, it would appear clear that more time and effort
needs to be spent thinking carefully about the issues implicit in these assumptions.
In particular it seems that the discussions and debates that currently surround
educational technology would benefit considerably from serious consideration of
what is meant by these broad-brush allusions to the ‘global’, ‘globalised’ and so on.
In other words, any serious discussion of contemporary educational technology
needs first to be considered against the backdrop of what has become known as
globalisation theory. Indeed, despite the obvious connections between educational
technology and the wider global changes in society there has been surprisingly little
attempt to link the prevailing arguments and assumptions about education and
technology with what is known about ‘globalised’ society and theories of so-called
‘globalisation’ (although see Buchanan 2011). It is to this subject that we must now
turn our attention.
While used frequently in popular, political and academic debates, the concept of
‘globalisation’ is an often ill-defined and inconsistently applied term. Indeed, as John
Urry (2002) describes it, the term ‘globalisation’ belies a ‘confusing mixture’ of
various disparate and conflicting issues and agendas. In an everyday sense, the notion
of globalisation is used most often to refer simply to a vague notion of “increasing
connectedness of human activity across the world” (Unwin 2009a, p.15). Yet in a
more focused sense, the economist Theo Levitt popularised the notion of ‘globali-
sation’ during the first half of the 1980s to describe on-going global changes with
regard to production, consumption and investment. In these terms, at least, it is
difficult to argue against the recent historical significance of globalisation. Yet as the
considerable debates that have taken place in the wake of Levitt’s initial work sug-
gest, we certainly should not accept the globalisation thesis as a given. Instead, it is
perhaps most helpful to approach globalisation as a contested concept.
It is here that we can turn to Colin Hay’s distinction between the notion of
globalisation as discourse and globalisation as process (see Hay and Rosamond 2002).
In these terms, much of what we discuss in this book refers to globalisation
as discourse – i.e. how the abstract idea of general globalised change is used as