Page 73 - Education in a Digital World

60 International Organisations

‘managed internet services’ to public school corporations. Despite its diverse
constitution, this interest group has worked successfully to raise the profile of the
issue of twenty-first-century skills within the US education system. The partnership
has produced frameworks and resources, hosted National Summits for education
leaders and policymakers, and even influenced state education policy. The partner-
ship played a key role, for example, in supporting West Virginia to change the
content of its state-wide assessment programmes and ‘professional development
expectations’ to include the teaching and assessment of twenty-first-century skills in
the classroom. The partnership also supported the US Conference of Mayors to pass
a policy resolution supporting an educational framework for ‘twenty-first-century
readiness’.
Thus the fact that ‘twenty-first-century skills’ is now a component of assessment
in West Virginian schools is due to a complex circuit of interests and events that
originated far beyond local educational officials in Charleston or even federal officials
in Washington, DC. Indeed, all of these examples show how the efforts of SNOs,
TNCs, MNCs and IGOs interact with other private and public actors at national
and local levels to produce a range of models, frameworks and evidence for what
‘educational technology’ is and what it is used for. These international organisations,
therefore, play an extensive but largely obscured role in setting agendas and
influencing ‘the tone of the conversation’ around educational technology. While
working to construct cases for change, these organisations also work to provide
the means to achieve that change – thus taking responsibility for defining problems
and defining their solutions. The success of these actions is subtle but significant.
Take, for example, the vocabulary that reflects recent shifts in the dominant dis-
courses that surround popular, professional and policy discussions of education and
technology – not least terms such as ‘innovation’, ‘personalisation’, ‘enhancement’
and ‘redesign’.
Given this complex of activity, it is worth reminding ourselves of the reasons and
rationales underpinning all these efforts. Of course, on the one hand, there is a
desire to instigate a ‘technological culture’ into education systems and to ensure
the continuation of markets for educational technology products. However, these
efforts are also driven by wider efforts to pursue neo-liberal agendas of making
the connection between technology use and the human capital interests of the know-
ledge economies and the continuation of the global economic competition outlined
in Chapter 1. It is clear from the example above, how the ‘twenty-first-century skills’
agenda maps closely onto what are assumed to be the required skill-sets of the
knowledge economy. Indeed, it could be argued that the focus of the ‘twenty-first-
century skills’ concept was not simply to get more digital devices placed into
schools, but to support the transformation of economy and society. As one of the
intellectual architects of the ‘twenty-first-century skills’ agenda described it,
“knowledge creation, technology, technological innovativeness and knowledge sharing
can contribute to the transformation of the education system and to sustained
economic growth and social development” (Kozma 2005, p.142).