Page 96 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 83

Nonsense or not, it certainly makes sense to conclude that the national strategies
outlined in this chapter are not direct attempts to alter educational practice per se.
Instead, following Jensen and Lauritsen’s (2005, p.365) reasoning, all these state
technology policies appear to work “rather like a relay between certain administrative
and political practices and a diversity of local initiatives”. Thus it is perhaps to
be expected that education policies such as the Japanese ‘New Deal for Schools’ or
the various US Educational Technology Plans will not have homogeneous and
predictable ‘effects’. While these policies may well have led to a number of inten-
ded consequences, they are also associated with a range of unintended and unex-
pected consequences. Such outcomes are often only apparent when the policies
have entered local educational settings and have been enacted upon by managers,
administrators, teachers and students. From this perspective, we need to remain
mindful of the capacity of state policies to produce as well as address problems –
especially in the medium and long term as “the second, third or fourth generation
of effects produced by previous policy actions and instruments” begin to reveal
themselves (Considine 2005, p.21). Indeed, the unintended consequences of
education technology policymaking tend to be cumulative and certainly not under
control of state authorities.
Thus despite the commonalities between the policy efforts of the UK, US, Japan,
Chile, Singapore and others, it would be a mistake to see the implementation and
use of digital technology in educational settings around the world as simply the
product of national interpretations of global economic agendas. In making sense
of education in a digital world, we also need to consider the influence and effects of
local contexts in giving specific form and content to the otherwise generalised
notions of educational technology as expressed through education policies. As with
any area of educational intervention, the practices and processes of educational
technology must also be made local, as general ideas and discourses are given
‘specificform’ and ‘specific content’ (Jenson and Santos 2000). So while the compara-
tive education approach may well encourage an interest in “the similarities across
national settings” (Samoff 2007, p.49), we need to remain mindful of the many
differences and discontinuities that persist within national borders when it comes to
educational technology use. It is, therefore, time to move our attention towards
the importance of “local politics and culture and tradition and the processes of
interpretation and struggle involved in translating these generic solutions into prac-
tical policies and institutional practices” (Ball 2006, p.76). The next chapter will
now go on to explore the localised realities of education and technology.