Page 88 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 75

into the non-profit ‘open’ economy of social media, arguing that: “information
created or commissioned by the Government for educational use by teachers or
students and made available online should clearly demarcate the public’s right
to use, modify, and distribute the information” (Federal Open Government
Directive 2009, p.8).
These ambitions to use digital technology as a means of enhancing the distribution
of education is often accompanied by a concurrent concern with supporting the
economic function of a country’s indigenous IT industry. For example, the ‘infant
industry’ argument was certainly prominent in UK, US and Japanese efforts in the
1980s to introduce digital technology into educational settings. Here educational
technology was presented as a means of stimulating the indigenous IT industry and
technological research and development. Aside from offering a ready marketplace
for local IT products, educational institutions were seen as a benign testing ground
for the development of indigenous IT industries free from the more unforgiving
realities of the open marketplace and critical consumers. As the UK government
argued in 1980, “schools should be provided with small and low-cost micro-
computers and software systems. To give a boost to our own hardware industry,
they should be asked to design and supply these quickly” (‘National Strategy for IT’
1980 – cited in Baker 1993, p.476).
Various aspects of the economics of educational technology notwithstanding, a
further prominent theme that runs throughout all of the five nations’ policy histories
can be said to be one of comparative economic advantage. Within this discourse,
educational technology policies have been presented typically as addressing two
economic criteria. First, they represent a concerted attempt to change the economic
‘mind-set’ of future workers towards a technologically based global competition.
This articulates with global economic concerns of national competitiveness, the
up-skilling of workforces and performative logic of the labour market. As can
be seen in the stated intentions of the US and Singaporean policy drives across the
1990s and 2000s:

if we help all of our children to become technologically literate, we will give a
generation of young people the skills they need to enter this new knowledge- and
information-driven economy.
(US Department of Education 1996)

to equip [students] with the critical competencies and dispositions to succeed
in a knowledge economy.
(Singapore Ministry of Education 2008)

A further economic justification for investment in digital technology across educa-
tion systems relates to the frequently stated need to up-grade the skills base of
cohorts of new workers entering into national labour forces. This has often been
articulated in terms of the notion of ‘employability’ and the increased importance