Page 90 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 77

Educational Technology and the Societal Concerns of
Nation States

As all these examples suggest, the association between education technology and
economic issues would seem to run deep across the policy agendas of all five
nations. In many ways, then, educational technology is a prominent symbol of
economic competitiveness between established and aspirant knowledge-driven
economies. Yet these linkages notwithstanding, the complex social reality of edu-
cational technology should not be reduced solely to economic factors. Instead, we
need to also consider the role of education technology in terms of the (re)formation
of nation states. It is therefore worth reflecting on how the various education
technology initiatives of the UK, US, Japan, Chile and Singapore also appear to
fulfil similar functions with regard to the role of national education systems in
the formation of nations as ‘information societies’. In this sense, we need to explore
the totemic use of education technology by nation states as a high-profile means of
being seen to actually ‘do something’ about the reconstruction of society in the
information age.
In this respect, a key societal aspect of the policy histories of the UK, US,
Japan, Chile and Singapore has been the positioning of educational technology as a
means of addressing issues of citizenship. For example, the Japanese and Singaporean
educational technology policy agendas reflect a distinct recurrent desire to “equip
children with the skills, attitudes and knowledge to participate in the modern nation
state, including its bureaucracies, its morals and its ideological foundation” (Lim
and Hedberg 2009, p.170). This has certainly been expressed in these countries’
emphases on encouraging ‘appropriate’, ‘responsible’ and ‘wise’ use of technology
amongst their student populations. In Singapore, for example, the third Masterplan
included the provision of “cyber-wellness programmes in schools to encourage the
responsible use of ICT among students” (Grace Fu – Ministry of Education, 2010).
Conversely, in Japan, great emphasis was placed during the 2000s on “teaching
children how to use wisely the new media” (e-Japan Strategy 2003).
In contrast to this promotion of a collective sense of technology-related citizenship,
much attention has been paid in countries such as the US and UK to the role of
educational technology in pre-empting potential problems of the emerging ‘infor-
mation society’ for the individual citizen. In many countries – especially during the
1990s and 2000s – educational technology was positioned as a key aspect in
state efforts to address issues of ‘opportunity’ especially for lower socio-economic
groups and other marginalised communities. US and UK policy programmes over
the last three decades, for example, have reflected long-standing concerns over
using education as a means of countering the creation of ‘digital divides’ and new
forms of digital exclusion. Early US policies spoke of the desire to “provide
resources for those communities facing the greatest challenges” (US Department of
Education 1996). As UK politicians argued nearly fifteen years later, the educational
use of digital technology “is a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty”