Page 60 - Education in a Digital World

International Organisations 47

education technology, and educational management information systems,
along with courses being taught over the internet as part of distance learning.

What is perhaps most striking about Spring’s lengthy description is the extent
to which most of these aspects of the World Bank’s educational technology
programme have gone relatively unnoticed within academic analysis of educational
technology. Despite the clearly extensive interests that an organisation such as the
World Bank has had in educational technology, one would be hard-pressed to find
acknowledgement (let alone critical analysis) of these efforts within the academic
educational technology literature. As such, it is important that we take the time
to examine the educational technology agendas of these SNOs and IGOs in
further detail.

Mapping Supranational Involvement in Educational Technology:
The Case of the United Nations

One of the most-involved ‘public’ international organisations in the field of educational
technology is the United Nations (UN). As an organisation acting on behalf
of every sovereign state in the world, the main concerns of the UN tend to be
centred on major issues of international security and law, economic development,
human rights and social progress. Yet within this substantial brief, the UN has long
promoted the importance of educational technology. As Kofi Annan (then
Secretary-General of the organisation) proclaimed in 2003, “while education
unlocks the door to development, increasingly it is information technologies that
can unlock the door to education” (cited in United Nations 2003). Beneath
bold statements such as these, the UN has pursued a wide-ranging educational
technology agenda over the past thirty years – from the direct sponsorship of
discrete projects to more indirect efforts to influence the nature and form of
educational technology use around the world.
Much of this work has taken place through the activities of a number of specialised
UN agencies and programmes. At the beginning of the 2000s, for example, the
UN’s ‘ICT Task Force’ notably included education as a key component of its
work, resulting in a series of forums and documents such as ‘Harnessing the
Potential of ICT for Education’ and the running of the ‘Global e-Schools and
Communities Initiative’. Education also formed a prominent focus for the activities
of the volunteer-led UN ‘information technology service’ (which oversaw educa-
tional technology projects in development contexts) and the UN’s ‘development
programme’ (which, for example, championed the use of ‘open source’ software
in education).
Aside from specific activities of this kind, the main educational technology
components of the UN’s activities have been pursued through the organisation’s
educational agency – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO). UNESCO’s educational technology activities have taken