Page 68 - Education in a Digital World

International Organisations 55

strategically selected schools. This saw the company involved, for example, in the
rebuilding of schools affected by the 2005 hurricanes in the Gulf Coast region of
the US. On a worldwide level, Cisco fund and support a Cisco Networking
Academy designed to provide online training, testing and accreditation for indivi-
duals wishing to train as IT professionals regardless of geographic or socio-economic
circumstance. Since 1997, this online initiative has included more than 2.7 million
aspiring IT professionals in over 165 countries.

Understanding the Significance of the Private Sector in
Educational Technology
All these examples illustrate the extensive and diverse nature of private and com-
mercial activity in various forms of educational technology provision and practice.
In many ways, then, the educational technology programmes of companies such as
Cisco, Microsoft and Apple should be seen as approaching (and in some cases
exceeding) the educational technology programmes of national governments. As
such, the activities of these companies and their commercial competitors are key to
the sustenance of many instances of educational technology use around the world.
Often these commercial interests operate alongside each other, as evident in
Michelle Selinger’s (2009) recounting of a Kenyan scheme where schools were
provided with laptops by British Airways, subsidised internet access from Microsoft
and wireless access points paid for by Cisco. As this example suggests, technology
is an area of educational provision where there is ample room for different com-
mercial interests to get involved in whatever ways and for whatever reasons they see
fit. Crucially, this has seen the increased involvement of commercial interests with
no direct background in either technology or education. Considerable consterna-
tion was caused in 2009, for example, by the involvement of the McDonald’s
restaurant chain in funding state-endorsed online mathematics tuition for Australian
school students.
Indeed, as with the non-profit activities of SNOs and IGOs described earlier,
the intentions and effects of these commercial agendas are varied. On one hand,
involvement with educational technology is clearly of symbolic value to the
companies concerned – being seen ‘to be doing something’ above and beyond
selling products and pursuing profits. The positioning of many of these activities
within ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘community programmes’ reflects the
desire of many companies to project a distinct philanthropic air to their support of
educational technology use. In this sense, educational technology provides a ready
means for what Stephen Ball terms the “import of American-style corporate
philanthropy and the use of ‘positional investments’ by business organisations and
the ‘acting out’ of corporate social responsibility” (Ball 2007, p.122). As just
described, these positional investments take a variety of forms – from the ‘donation’
of computer equipment to local schools, to the commercially sponsored re-equipping
and re-training of whole education systems.