Page 87 - Education in a Digital World
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74 National Policymaking
(US Department of Education 2010). Indeed, the linkages between technology use
and educational efficiency are exemplified in the following statement from the
Obama administration’s plan:
To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink
basic assumptions and redesign our education system. We must apply tech-
nology to implement personalised learning and ensure that students are
making appropriate progress through our K-16 system so they graduate.
These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times and
basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we
spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report
spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete
view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such
visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within
the budgets we can afford.
(US Department of Education 2010, p.x)
These motivations notwithstanding, some instances of state interest in technology-
based education are also centred on straightforward motivations of contemporary
economic production. Indeed, the hope of using digital technology as a means of
increasing the ‘sale’ of a nation’s education products within domestic (and on
occasion international) marketplaces is certainly evident in a few of the policy drives
outlined above. As the UK government asserted at the launch of its planned
‘e-University’ initiative:
Virtual networks eradicate the distance between the student and the provider,
thus opening up a genuinely global learning market. Learning provision can
be customised for individual need and delivered to specification, extending
the boundaries of choice and flexibility beyond the confines of the seminar
room or lecture hall. And learning is subject to new economies: once the
investment in research and development of learning material has been made,
the learning programme can be delivered at minimal marginal cost to an
infinite number of people.
(Blunkett 2000)
Instances such as these therefore see educational technology being used to reflect
the dynamics of global capitalism and the intensification of the economic function
of knowledge and learning. Interestingly, some of the rhetoric from the US gov-
ernment has stressed the use of digital technology to pursue redistributive rather
than purely profit-making ends. In 1998, for example, President Clinton endorsed
the expansion of technology-based education with a view to “guarantee universal,
excellent education for every child on our planet”. Similarly, the fourth Educational
Technology Plan stressed the need to promote US-produced educational content