Page 84 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 71

and 2008, setting baseline technology standards for all schools, establishing
technology-orientation assessment and accreditation schemes, as well as continuing
state investment in hardware and software. This phase also saw the Singaporean
government collaborating with the private sector to establish six technology-rich
‘FutureSchools@Singapore’ primary and secondary schools. A third S$840 million
Masterplan (2009–14) has extended these efforts by concentrating, in the
Singaporean government’s words, on ‘strengthening the integration of ICT into
curriculum, assessment and pedagogy’ and using digital technology to develop
‘competencies for the twenty-first century’.

Unpacking the Motivations behind National Educational
Technology Policymaking
The significance of all these policy programmes extends clearly beyond their varying
financial scope and technological ambition. Indeed, at first glance it could be con-
cluded that these different approaches to infusing national education systems with
digital technology follow an essentially deterministic expectation of technological
change leading to substantial educational improvement. Yet upon further inspec-
tion, it is difficult to argue convincingly that national policymakers have developed
such policies and initiatives solely with ‘educational’ outcomes in mind. Instead, it
could be observed that these are all policies intended to address a number of economic,
social and cultural issues within each country. As such, all these different examples
of educational technology policymaking could also be seen as ideological forms
whose internal contradictions and ‘fuzziness’ serve to mask a range of wider non-
educational agendas they have been used to propagate within their specific national
contexts.
One significant aspect of the policy programmes just described is their role in
shaping wider understandings and expectations of education – with nation states
using these education policies to play an important legitimising and normalising role
as discursive devices. The discursive role of policy refers to the meanings, intentions,
values and beliefs that lie behind these formalised expressions of state intent.
State policies can therefore be seen as symbolic systems of values, acting as a means
of representing, accounting for and legitimating particular political decisions. In
this discursive sense, then, the educational technology policies of the five countries
described above could be seen as having been formulated not only to achieve
material effects but also to manufacture support for those effects (see Ball 1998).
With these distinctions in mind, it is therefore useful to reconsider the ways in
which digital technology use has been imagined and ‘written into’ these state edu-
cational technology policies over the past thirty years, paying particular attention to
the ideological values and implications that these policies set out to convey.
In this spirit, there are a number of themes and motivations that could be seen to
underpin the educational technology policies of the UK, US, Japan, Chile and
Singapore – not least the ways in which the educational implementation of digital