Page 9 - Education in a Digital World

viii Preface

(over)developed Euro-American contexts. The unfortunate inability of many native
English speakers to become proficient readers and speakers of other languages means
that great swathes of educational technology discussion and debate remain out of
sight and out of mind. As a result, many of the issues and concerns that are
of importance outside the English-speaking regions remain at the periphery of the
field. One of my intentions in writing this book was to push some of these issues
further into Anglophone educational technology discussion and debate. Educational
technology is certainly a field in need of an expanded global consciousness.
Significantly, then, this is not a book whose perception of the term ‘global’
is confined to over-developed regions such as the US, Europe, Australasia and
East Asia. Indeed, educational technologists would do well to take heed of Divya
McMillin’s (2007, p.9) criticism of the media and communications literature – when
arguing that “the generalisation of US and UK experiences to the rest of the world
is a growing source of embarrassment among scholars”. In the same spirit, the
present book has been written in response to the clear need for a more inter-
nationalised and comparative analysis of educational technology. This is a book that
focuses deliberately on the state of education and technology in Africa, South
America, South Asia and the Middle East as well as the more documented cases of
Europe, North America and East Asia.
Another motivation for writing this book is my on-going desire to develop
analyses of educational technology that are more socially attuned. Despite the best
efforts of a few critically minded scholars, there is still a distinct reluctance amongst
educational technology writers and researchers to think about the connections
between digital technology use and the wider world – i.e. what takes place beyond
the immediate context of the technological artefact and the individual user. I have
long believed that any analyst interested in engaging with the topic of educational
technology should focus on the ‘bigger picture’. This entails asking a wide range of
awkward questions. For example, what are the connections between digital tech-
nology and the politics of education? What connections are there between the use
of digital technology in education and matters of economics and economy? How is
educational technology connected with the many cultural formations and social
relations that constitute ‘society’? This book, then, is a modest attempt to identify
and explore some of these connections – especially as they appear to be taking
shape at international as well as at subnational levels.
While I had always assumed that my writing was reasonably sympathetic towards
these ‘bigger picture’ issues, my early preparations for writing this book left me
quickly aware of my previous failures to think properly about the connections and
disconnections between educational technology and what can be simplistically
described as the ‘global’ arena. Even having finished the book, the more that I read
about ‘other’ contexts and countries then the more I become aware of the (dis)-
connections between educational technology and local contexts and settings.
Looking back on my earlier experiences of encountering educational technology
around the world it is now obvious, for example, that observing the use of laptop