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86 Local Variations

education systems or their influence over national economic fortunes. Thus all of
the policy programmes and initiatives reviewed in Chapter 4 are perhaps best
understood as a way for governments to appear ‘on message’ with a number of key
political concerns – not least global economic concerns of national competitiveness,
the up-skilling of workforces, the dynamics of global capitalism and the intensifi-
cation of the economic function of knowledge. What these policies and initiatives
are not able to do, however, is tell us how and why digital technologies are actually
being used in educational settings in any particular country or locality.
In one sense, then, educational technology policies and the educational technol-
ogy actions of international organisations present a rather homogenised and partial
account of educational technology use around the world. All of the policies
reviewed in Chapter 4, for example, relay well-worn mantras of a computer for
every student, technology-rich curricula, highly trained teacher workforces, thriving
indigenous IT industries, and re-skilled workforces. We now need to move beyond
these ‘global models’ of educational technology and, instead, pay attention to what
is taking place at the local level of analysis. In this sense, we need to consider how
the ‘global flows’ of educational policymaking and supranational activity end up
being ‘vernacularised’ in the contexts of specific countries and societies as they meet
local cultures and politics (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Thus in order to develop a
more rounded understanding of how and why educational technologies are used
(and not used) in the diverse ways that they are around the world, we now need to
consider the complex interactions between the global and the local.
At this point, we can return to the issues outlined in Chapter 2 as arising from
the comparative education tradition – in particular the ‘culturalist’ tradition of
comparative education that seeks to examine “the way global policies are inter-
preted, adapted and changed at the local level” (Spring 2009, p.117). This approach
raises a number of questions that can be of use in understanding the local recon-
textualisations of educational technology policies and the actions of organisations
such as the UN, OECD and Microsoft. For example, how do local actors borrow
and adapt concepts and practices from the national and global flows of educational
ideas about technology? How are these concepts of ‘educational technology’ subject
to local distinctiveness and resilience, or even what Gabriel and Sturdy (2002) term
a ‘politicisation of local identity’? How are digital technologies framed in terms of
local social, political, economic and cultural imperatives?
These questions certainly chime with the socio-technical tradition of viewing
digital technologies as shaped continually by the social contexts in which they are
implemented and used. From the social shaping perspective, it is simply not good
enough to assume, for example, that any specific educational technology will have
an essentially similar influence on classrooms and learners in London as it would in
Lima or Lahore. Instead, social shaping warns against discounting the local influ-
ences that shape the nature and form of ‘educational technology’ in these very dif-
ferent contexts. As Cherian George (2005, p.914) reminds us, “communication
technologies are not independent variables appearing from out the blue … their