Page 27 - Education in a Digital World

14 Developing a Global Perspective

Mirroring many of the concepts outlined earlier on in this chapter, Wilson describes
contemporary global higher education as being a fluid and continuous process which is
also more competitive for institutions and individuals alike. An individual is no longer
assumed to be instructed for a fixed period of time in a fixed place – instead
learning is framed as an individually centred and individually driven process.
Moreover, the focus of this educational provision is seen to reflect the growing
significance of the intellectually based head work of the knowledge economy as
opposed to the manual body work of the industrial economy (Brown et al. 2011). As
Betty Collis (2006, p.216) concurs, “know-why and know-who matters more than
know-what”.
As Wilson’s description also implies, many of these changes relate to the nature of
how education is now expected to be delivered. Most educationalists would agree
that educational provision no longer needs to be bound either to the dominant
institutional forms of the university, college or school, or to the dominant life-cycle
of childhood to late adolescence and early adulthood. From a practical perspective,
it is now received wisdom that education is a lifelong concern that should take
place throughout society – reflecting the knowledge economy-related concept of
‘lifelong learning’ outlined earlier. From a more philosophical perspective, much of
Wilson’s description also reflects the on-going ‘crisis of meaning’ that institutions
such as the university and school are undergoing in a world where national cultures
and nation state are no longer significant, given their historical role as “the primary
institution of national culture in the modern nation-state” (Readings 1996, p.12).
In all these senses, recent globalisations of education can be seen to present a
fundamental challenge to established notions of what education is and what education
is for. More substantially, these globalised practices and processes appear to be at the
heart of significant changes to the nature and form of educational provision and
practices. It is here, then, that educational technology can be understood to be of
particular significance – a key element of how education is being re-orientated,
realigned and reconstituted. Indeed, digital technology is a central element of all the
areas of change outlined above – from the measuring and testing, to the marketing,
delivering and consuming of education. If we cast our minds back to the various
forms of educational technology highlighted at the beginning of the chapter – for
example, the ‘edgeless university’ and ‘virtual school’, ‘open education’ and ‘glob-
ally networked learning environments’– then it is easy to see how the promise of
these new technology-driven educational forms offer a ready means of addressing
the widely accepted and expected educational challenges of globalised change.

Towards a Critical Understanding of Education, Technology
and Globalisation
This vision of newly globalised forms of education driven by economic, cultural,
social and political change and supported by digital technology offers a comfortingly
straightforward portrayal of contemporary education. Yet this simplicity of