Page 47 - Education in a Digital World

34 Theoretical Approaches

Latin America) by various configurations of the ‘rich North’ (Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan
2008). What exactly, then, are the connections between educational technology
and the interests of North America, Western Europe, Japan and their constituent
organisations such as the G-20 group of major economies, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank?
We will return to these issues throughout our later discussions, alongside wider
questions of (inter)national intent and agency. For example, often these unequal
relations between countries are justified under wider discourses of ‘modernisation’
and ‘development’ and, as such, some of these relationships could be described as
consensual rather than conflictory in nature. As we shall see in Chapter 6, for
example, this would certainly be the position held by those interests seeking to
bring educational technologies to poorer nations as part of international aid efforts.
Indeed, digital technology and the wider connotations of the ‘information society’
have long been used in the continuation of the long-standing neo-liberal project
of ‘modernisation’ where market-led democracy is presented as “a ‘model’ of
development or progress that others can emulate” (Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan 2008,
p.104). Yet the extent to which these arrangements are any less exploitative or
unequal is unclear. As Hirst et al. (2009, p.6) contend, it could be argued that
unequal neo-imperialist relations are actually perpetuated as the result of “a new
strategy of unilateral action, building under its leadership transient ‘coalitions of the
willing’ that vary in composition depending upon the objective at hand”.
From this perspective, the use of digital technology in education is linked
potentially with a number of issues that are of interest to the post-colonial
perspective – not least the perpetuation and reconfiguration of patterns of depen-
dency between countries. In particular, it could be argued that the so-called
modernisation of developing societies through the increased use of educational
technology perhaps makes them more dependent on the developed North – both
for the technology itself and for the associated financial assistance. In focusing on
and problematising these long-standing patterns and relations, the post-colonial
perspective therefore introduces a number of questions relating to the role of
technology in educational settings around the world. In this sense, post-colonialism
offers a useful means of understanding the issues surrounding educational
technology use in those countries and contexts outside the usual field of vision of
the academic study of educational technology. The concerns and concepts asso-
ciated with the post-colonialist approach can therefore support the ‘renarrativisation’
of our understandings of technology and education. In particular, post-colonialism
can play the useful role of shifting attention away from the Euro-American
concerns that tend to dominate the field, and towards the perspective of those
formally colonised by European powers. The post-colonialist framework can
therefore allow us to literally ‘turn the world upside down’ (McMillin 2007, p.183),
to consider the ‘not-spots’ as well as the ‘hot-spots’ of the information society,
and also to highlight the inequalities that persist within these settings. As McMillin
(2007, p.3) concludes: