Page 81 - Education in a Digital World

68 National Policymaking

technological infrastructure ‘available for learning when and where learners and
educators need it’; and the ‘redesign of education processes and structures to take
advantage’ of technology-supported productivity. Alongside a continued commit-
ment to fund the procurement of technology and teacher training, the Obama plan
proved to be the impetus for a number of ambitious data-related programmes – not
least providing ‘open’ access to educational resources through a Federal government-
run Learning Registry, and sharing educational data on students and institutions
through a ‘National Education Data Model’.

Educational Technology Policymaking in Japan
While technology education (gijutsu ka) had been a required school subject since the
end of the 1950s, the Japanese government was relatively slow to introduce com-
puter technology into its formal education policy arrangements. In the late 1980s,
the government introduced a computer literacy component into lower secondary
school curriculum (entitled ‘Fundamentals of Information’) while also requiring
the use of computers in upper-secondary school science and mathematics classes (see
Murata and Stern 1993). During the latter half of the 1990s, the Japanese govern-
ment then moved to establish a ‘Japanese Information Infrastructure’ (JII), keen
to reaffirm its international technological reputation. The construction of the tech-
nological infrastructure alone was estimated to cost ¥100 trillion with targets of
educational and health institutions being connected to the internet by 2000 and all
homes by 2010 (Latzer 1995).
Although most of the JII plans were financed by the private sector, the health
and education elements of network services were government led. This saw the
introduction in 1999 of the ‘IT in Education Project’ with its original intention of
having all primary and secondary schools connected to the internet by 2003 – a date
that was later moved forward by a combination of additional government funding
and private sector commitments to offer discounted rates to schools. In educational
terms, then, the main focus of the JII drive was on meeting the perceived needs of
an ‘information-orientated society’, with a practical emphasis placed on developing
information literacy and encouraging the efficient use of information (see
McLaughlin 1999). A revised IT based curriculum was introduced to all schools in
2002, with newly qualified teachers required to gain qualifications in information
systems and information retrieval from the internet.
In 2003 an extensive ‘e-Japan Strategy’ was then introduced, featuring a number
of new education-related targets and goals – not least the promise of high-speed
internet connections to be established in classrooms in all public schools alongside
the achievement of a student–computer ratio of 5.4 by 2005. Despite these targets
only being partially met, a subsequent raft of digital technology-based plans
was introduced as part of the Japanese government’s 2009 ‘School New Deal Plan’.
This proposed the introduction of electronic whiteboards into all schools, laptops
provided to teachers, alongside the establishment of school local area networks and