Page 71 - Education in a Digital World

58 International Organisations

As such, the main influence and importance of these international organisations
should not be seen in isolated or mutually exclusive terms. Instead, in making sense
of how these different organisations shape educational technology, we need to
recognise the inter-organisational dynamics and collaborative activities between
different groups. Key here is understanding how the activities of these supranational
agencies, intergovernmental organisations and multinational corporations work in
combination to shape the nature and form of what is encountered as ‘educational
technology’ around the world. We, therefore, need to recognise how these orga-
nisations add to the circulation of ideas and concepts that sharpen understandings
and steer expectations of what educational technology is, and what educational
technology is for. As such, it is useful to see the activities and influences of all these
different interests as often mutually reinforcing and co-complementary, despite the
clear differences that exist in terms of long-term motivations or ultimate aims.
A prominent example of the combined nature of these interests is the notion of
‘twenty-first-century skills’– an increasingly pervasive feature of educational technology
discourses and debates around the world throughout the 2000s and 2010s. At one
level, the notion of ‘twenty-first-century skills’ is a straightforward and increasingly
uncontested element of current educational thinking. As such, ‘twenty-first-century
skills’ is now an accepted description of the required skill-sets, competencies, peda-
gogies, curricular and assessment reforms and systemic arrangements that are seen to
underpin education reform over the 2010s and 2020s – quite simply a blueprint for
education in a digital age. While descriptions of these ‘twenty-first-century skills’
may vary, the underlying imperatives remain the same – i.e. changing the structures,
processes and practices of schools, teachers and students along more high-tech,
networked and ‘innovative’ lines. While these descriptions may appear plausible, the
questions of how and why the idea of ‘twenty-first-century skills’ came to be promoted
with the success that it has, provides an interesting insight into the influence of all
the actors and interests outlined in this chapter so far.
First, it is worth considering the many ways in which the idea of ‘twenty-first-
century skills’ was developed and promoted over the 2000s. Here it would seem
that the rise of the notion of ‘twenty-first-century skills’ was co-ordinated in no
small part through the efforts of a number of supranational organisations involved
in formulating frameworks, raising issues and agenda-setting. Key here was
UNESCO’s ICT Competency Framework for Teachers with its explicit focus on
‘twenty-first-century skills’. Also of significance was the OECD New Millennium
Learners programme with its positioning of so-called twenty-first-century compe-
tencies (defined as “the skills and competencies that a knowledge economy
requires”) within the educational agenda for the PISA comparative educational
indicators. Alongside these developments, were the efforts of multinational tech-
nology corporations in facilitating research and development efforts to outline and
promote the ‘principles’ of twenty-first-century skills. One such initiative was
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the ‘Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow – Today’ programme (ACOT ), run during
the 2000s with its aim of “changing the conversation about teaching, technology