Page 77 - Education in a Digital World

64 National Policymaking

Educational Technology Policymaking as a Global Trend
Although considered rarely in the academic study of educational technology, state gov-
ernance has an obvious influence on contemporary education arrangements. At a basic
level, education policies are an official representation of the courses of action taken
by governments and other agencies of the state with respect to their obligations to
deliver and regulate education provision. State policies therefore set out an official
‘bottom line’ on a wide range of educational issues – from the nature of what education
institutions are legally obliged to provide to their students, to the amounts and types
of funding that are directed towards different components of an education system.
Education technology policy can therefore be seen as a formalisation of state intent to
guide the implementation of digital technologies throughout national education systems.
As Peeraer and Tran (2009, p.1) describe, “strategic policies can provide a rationale, a set
of goals, and a vision for how education systems might be with the introduction of ICT”.
It is therefore understandable that the integration of digital technology into
education systems has been a growing feature of state education policymaking over
the past three decades. From initial efforts in the UK, Sweden and Canada at
the start of the 1980s, the past thirty years have witnessed a steady expansion of
educational technology policymaking around the world. During the 1980s these
policies revolved largely around the provision of computers in classrooms and the
development of ‘computer literacy’ amongst students and teachers. Policymaking
during the 1990s and 2000s then commonly took the form of nationwide pro-
grammes of teacher training and support for indigenous IT industries – introduced
by national governments keen to ensure that the circumstances existed for the
effective educational use of internet-based digital technologies.
Now as the 2010s progress, educational technology can be said to constitute a
major policy concern across all nations, regardless of a country’s global prominence
or relative economic wealth. Whereas state policymaking during the 1980s and
1990s was confined mainly to (over)developed countries in North America, northern
Europe and the ‘tiger economies’ of East Asia, the 2000s saw educational technol-
ogy emerge as a ‘global field’ of educational policy (see Lingard et al. 2005). Now
most countries in the world – regardless of political, economic or social circumstance –
boast substantial educational technology strategies. For example, educational tech-
nology has become a common element of the efforts of African nations to progress
to ‘middle income’ status – from the Ethiopian ‘ICT in Education Implementation
Strategy’ to the Rwandan government’s extensive twenty-year information and
communication plan (Rubagiza et al. 2011). This trend is replicated across the
northern and southern hemispheres – from the Jordanian ‘National Goals for Schooling
in the Twenty-First Century’ to the Brazilian ‘Proinfo Integrado’ programme (see
Qablan et al. 2009, Fidalgo-Neto et al. 2009). The worldwide scale of this policy
activity during the 2000s prompted one review to conclude that “the unchecked
fear of missing the fast ICT train to global prominence has resulted in [a] global
chase after e-learning” (Zhao et al. 2006, p.673).