Page 62 - Education in a Digital World

International Organisations 49

The Educational Technology Agendas of other Supranational and
Intergovernmental Organisations

Of course, the UN is just one of many SNOs and IGOs that act to influence the
role of technology within education systems worldwide. While the UN’s
focus could be said to encompass issues of social and cultural development, the
activities of other SNOs often reflect a more straightforward emphasis on economic
competitiveness. Unsurprisingly, a contrasting approach to the UN is that of the
World Bank, whose work tends to frame educational technology in more explicit
terms of market-led economic development. This is not to say, however, that the
scope of the World Bank’s educational technology agenda is any less diverse than
that of the UN. Over the past twenty years the World Bank educational technol-
ogy portfolio has involved projects to equip schools with computer laboratories
in countries as diverse as Armenia to Bhutan, through to supporting systematic
technology-based reform of educational systems in countries such as Jordan, Turkey
and Russia.
A similar diversity of action can be found in the educational technology work of
the European Union (EU). The EU’s promotion of educational technology has
been evident across its long-running ‘lifelong learning programme’, encompassing a
number of different programmes that boast an educational technology focus. These
range from initiatives encouraging online support of learning outside formal educa-
tional institutions, bridging inequalities in individuals’ access to information and
communication technologies (the so-called ‘digital divide’) and improving technology
skills in the workplace. One high-profile recent EU project was the ‘eTwinning’
initiative – a cross-Europe programme that aimed to use online resources and
services to “promote European school cooperation, collaborative learning and
project-based pedagogy”. Aside from specific interventions such as these, the EU
continues to seek to influence educational technology policymaking across its
member states. In particular, the EU’s European Schoolnet body has acted as a
forum for the thirty or so national official agencies within Europe that are con-
cerned with schools technology – from the Estonian Tiger Leap Foundation to the
Turkish General Directorate of Educational Technologies. As befits the wider remit
of the EU, all of these efforts reflect an agenda of ‘harmonisation’– i.e. the reduction
of individual and institutional differences between countries.
Educational technology has also been a significant aspect of the educational work
of the OECD. Alongside the production of policy briefings and reports, the OECD
has played a significant part in enrolling digital technology into the global ‘competition’
of education – not least through positional tools such as the ‘PISA world education
indicators’ which provide performance comparison measures and global educational
indicators between countries. While OECD’s interest in educational technology
during the 2000s concentrated primarily on policymaking and research on new
forms of technology-rich educational provision for what it termed ‘New Millennium
Learners’, in the early 2010s, this focus shifted to exploring the role of digital