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International Organisations 61

Conclusions
As the case of the ‘twenty-first-century skills’ agenda highlights, the activities of
international organisations play an important, if often low-profile, role in influen-
cing the tone of national and regional policy agendas as well as the nature of actual
practice ‘on the ground’. Although the involvement of international actors can be
seen as a necessary (or even welcome) component of the politics and provision of
education technology, it is notable how their agendas and actions tend to coalesce
around sets of common values and assumptions. Indeed, many of the actions that
have been discussed in this chapter work to position educational technology as a
central component of the neo-liberal framing of ‘education’ and – it follows – the
promotion of corporatised and marketised restructurings of a technology-rich world
system along market lines. Of course, in making these arguments, there is a danger
of over-stating or exaggerating the influence of these international interests on
educational use of digital technologies. As was noted earlier, these organisations are
seeking largely to exert various forms of ‘soft’ power within the global politics of
education and technology. As such, we need to remember that the efforts of all the
international organisations outlined in this chapter are not necessarily expected to
result in the direct change of educational technology per se – but rather to influence
the general climate and context of educational technology provision and practice.
As Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p.38) put it, these organisations are therefore con-
cerned primarily with “influencing, cajoling and directing” national governments –
or in the words of Stephen Ball (1998, p.124), suggesting and sponsoring particular
policy ‘solutions’ to identified educational ‘problems’.
One key point of significance to take forward into the next chapter, therefore, is
the often unspoken linkages between the international and the national levels of
influence on education and technology. The connections between the actions
of these transnational and supranational interests and the actions of national gov-
ernments are clearly complex. In terms of the significance of supranational agencies
and intergovernmental organisations, for example, one hitherto “deceptively
obvious point” is that many of these bodies (such as OECD, UNESCO and the
EU) are the deliberate creation of national governments who have ceded a degree
of their national sovereignty or autonomy in order to pursue the national interest
more effectively (Dale and Robertson 2002, p.15). Similarly, the ultimate interests
of multinational IT corporations such as Microsoft, Cisco and Apple could be said
to be focused more on local markets than on the actions of national governments
themselves. At best, then, the agendas and interests outlined in this chapter can only
be expected to influence what goes on at the level of national government
“by means of the trickle-down effect” (Dale and Robertson 2002, p.15). With this
thought in mind, it is worth thinking further about the role of the nation state
in the shaping of educational technology. In fact, given the extensive influence of
all the international interests reviewed in this chapter, what role is there for the
nation state at all?