Towards global and local histories of educational technologies: introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction summarises the objectives and themes of a special issue that highlights global-local interdependencies in the history of educational technologies. It suggests that discussions of the development, diffusion, and use of technologies of teaching and learning around the world could benefit from a broadening of the definition of educational technologies, a diversification of research materials and practices, and a focus on underrepresented voices and asymmetrical power relations. Offering such perspectives, the ten articles included in the special issue present welcome approaches to tracing the historical and contemporary adoption of technologies in and beyond educational settings.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• media
• educational technology
• power
• global and local

Within and between classrooms and cultures around the world, a wealth of instructional tools, texts, learning theories, as well as media discourses and practices, have been created, contested, and exchanged for centuries and with increasing speed in the digital age. Educational technologies, commonly understood as the digital and audio-visual devices produced by industries and exported to the world in the last several decades, have roots that are older and more diverse than is often acknowledged. From the illuminated lantern slides adopted and modified by European teachers to inculcate national, religious, and colonial identities in children (Egelmeers 2023; Moser 2019), to North American indigenous communities’ uses of computers to build culturally-specific information ontologies and teach linguistic heritage (Bishop 2022; Srinivasan 2017) educational technologies are not isolated or marginal objects but part of long-developing and influential ‘global educational mediascapes’ that convey information and imagery in our interconnected world (Goldfarb 2002, 19; Good 2020; Hof 2018; Robles 2021).

This special issue illuminates how the localised work of teaching with media has always been entangled with larger geostrategic, technological, political, economic, and social forces. It aims to look beyond the perspectives of ahistoricism and Western universalism that tend to frame traditional narratives of what educational technologies are, what they can do, and where they come from. The studies included in this special issue examine a range of devices and practices, from visible hardware to less-visible background systems, curricula, and policies (An and Oliver 2021). In each account, authors trace how the development, diffusion, and adoption of technologies for teaching and learning are embedded within global-local relationships, connected histories, and moments of reform, resistance, and reimagination. The studies at once acknowledge the dominance of computers and Western industries in influencing the ‘ed tech imaginaries’ of the recent past, and urge a more expansive view of what has historically ‘counted’ as an educational technology or a technologist (Williamson and Komljenovic 2023). More than hardware and software coming from Silicon Valley, these accounts shed light on how standardised tests, instructional radio broadcasts, correspondence courses, educational games, exhibits at world’s fairs, and models of ‘smart classrooms’ are just some of the technologies that educators have used to enhance, modernise, automate, and even liberate education from older or established approaches.

The studies in this special issue challenge and refine dominant understandings of technology use in the classroom as emerging primarily within Euro-American industrial contexts and as constituted by the ‘one-way’ export of Western technologies and ‘expertise’ around the world. By illuminating local and global circuits of instructional media, the authors invite an expansion of the definition of educational technologies, a diversification of research materials and practices, and a focus on underrepresented voices and asymmetrical power relations. The ten articles also suggest taking a closer look at the interactions between industries, governments, aid organisations, private foundations, and users. They compel us to consider how people have long approached schools and technologies as means to carry out not simply education, but a diversity of social and political projects, from bolstering international ‘development’, to liberating communities oppressed by racial apartheids and segregation, to reviving local and national industries disrupted by globalisation (Ames 2019; Flury and Geiss 2023; Rensfeldt and Rahm 2023).

The local: a perspective on people, settings, devices, and cultural practices

The authors in this special issue offer a range of approaches to internationalising the historiography of educational technologies by situating local media practices in global flows, and by critiquing industry hype cycles through the analysis of imaginaries. While we see the global and the local as intertwined analytical categories, we understand attention to the local as delving into medium specificities, specific practices and settings of use, and experiences that ought to be understood in close relation to cultural practices, histories, and traditions. This attention to ‘the particular’ brings into focus schools, districts, regions, and even national educational contexts, insofar as their approaches to teaching with technology have variously aligned with or diverged from those envisioned by powerful global corporations, international aid groups, and non-governmental organisations.

Highlighting the local demonstrates how ambitious efforts to link rural and ‘remote’ schools with urban centres began long before computers and the internet, with the advent of radio and television, as well as how these technologies were taken up in diverse ways in different cultural and geographic contexts. In the postcolonial decades of the 1950s to the 1980s, educational broadcasting was enlisted into a range of political projects in the ‘developing’ world, most famously in the case of U.S. efforts to install educational TV in American Samoa in the 1960s to bring the country ‘into the twentieth century in a hurry’ (Cain 2021, 66; Goldfarb 2002). Educational broadcasting was also happening in Cameroon, Gnebora Oumarou (2023, this issue) demonstrates, as the country sought to rebuild as an independent nation after the end of French and British colonial rule. While Cameroon’s ministry of education adopted radio to teach schoolchildren, officials also used it to resolve a teacher shortage, training over a thousand teachers via radio broadcasts and mailed correspondence packets before an economic crisis and infrastructural challenges led to the programme’s decline in the 1980s.

Local perspectives are also critical to shedding light on the oft-anticipated but ultimately uneven implementation of computers in schools, an effort which, scholars have noted, did not have the transformative effect on education that promoters hoped for (Selwyn 2023). In doing so, the authors in this special issue interrogate assumptions that technology can bring about reform, whether believed to be ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’. Ömer Demir (2023, this issue) shows that in Turkey, one of the largest government-supported efforts to date to equip schools with computers, known as the FATIH Project, led to an infusion of digital technologies into schools in the early 2010s. But a top-down ‘focus on hardware’ in hopes for a technology-driven revolution in educational outcomes obscured the complexities of needs on the ground, including a dearth of training for teachers and relevant instructional content. Critical studies of computers in education highlight the need for an international and historically-informed approach to educational policy, countering the ‘amnesia’ that has facilitated recurring promises and investments in new waves of unproven devices (Winner 2009). In India, as Kalyan Shankar, Sahni, and Roy (2023, this issue) explain, the proliferation of computers in education since the 1980s has been characterised by a dramatic digital divide stemming not only from inequitable federal and state provision of equipment to public schools, but also from local cultures of politically rooted resistance to computers. Scaling down from the national context to the state of West Bengal allows for a consideration of how both politics and path dependency can shape decisions about technology within institutional settings. In Switzerland, Fabian Grütter (2023, this issue) writes, the emergence and demise of a locally-produced school computer called the Smaky highlights how local and global forces should not be considered in isolation from each other. Local conditions including economic challenges resulting from a decline in watchmaking and other traditional Swiss industries created conditions for Smaky to emerge, an effort that was eventually overtaken by the rise of global computer giants.

More than engineers toiling in laboratories or technocrats in centralised offices, we see that educational technologists have included a diversity of overlooked figures, from small computer manufacturers to rural radio operators, enterprising interns, teachers and their family members, and other figures traditionally excluded from accounts of technological development. As tools designed to elicit users’ learning through engagement, furthermore, we also note how users – including children and teachers, figures often left out of histories of technology – have historically acted as co-creators or shapers of educational technologies (Ferrante and Dussel 2022). Narratives of educational technology invention not only lack consideration of developments outside the West, but also exclude large segments of the population within the West by focusing on the figure of the white male inventor or industry representative. Shayan Doroudi (2023, this issue) addresses the critical omission of African American inventors in the historiography of U.S. educational technology. Doroudi brings to the light the biographies of Black researchers whose visions for improving education with technology were intertwined with the struggle for racial equality. This work not only highlights the central and underexamined role that educational technologies have played in social movements, but also how critical studies of edtech can contribute to growing efforts within science and technology studies, information studies, and history of education to centre marginalised identities and interrogate power asymmetries development, distribution, and use of emerging technologies (McIlwain 2019; Towns 2022).

The global: tracing information flows, connections, shared beliefs, and power relations

While we account for local practices of media use in the classroom, we should also note how these are situated within global economic forces, intercultural interactions, and international media flows. From research into educational practices, the voices in this special issue invite us to bring a sustained focus to the asymmetries in access to knowledge, funding, and technology that have historically shaped the development and diffusion of media in education. In a participatory and networked media landscape constituted by the ‘global flows and counterflows’ of information produced both by powerful industries in media hubs and emergent players in new localities (Thussu 2007), it is important to acknowledge how educational technologies, like most forms of media, have acted as conduits of ideology, control, surveillance, representation, inequality, and resistance.

Understanding how technologies are used in education, and become freighted with educational and social values, requires moving past nation studies and the activities of official educational institutions. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that educational technologies have been useful for nation-building projects through curricula reform, which is as true for liberal states as for authoritarian regimes (González-Delgado 2020). Efforts by one country to support the expansion of educational technology use in another comprise another area that is ripe for study, particularly in the context of hegemonic international power relations and media imperialism. Accordingly, Wooyeong Kim (2023, this issue) offers a fascinating case study of educational technologies in South Korea as a form of ‘development aid’, noting that the U.S. encouraged the use of radio to train teachers in the reconstruction period after the Korean war and later recommended educational television as a way to ‘modernise’ the country during the Cold War. Nuancing narratives of how ‘development’-through-educational technology happens, Kim shows that South Korean actors adopted the foreign system only to develop it further within their existing cultural framework to adapt it to local needs and perceptions of modernisation.

Technology has been integral to globalisation, but ‘modernist’ visions of technology use in the classroom tend to steadily and deliberately exclude other ways of doing. The examples in this special issue reveal a persistent surfacing and resurfacing of techno-solutionism, or the assumption that technology can solve complex societal problems across eras and cultural contexts (Morozov 2013). We read this alongside a growing body of scholarship that has warned that technological investments long believed to benefit learning and level inequalities, such as increasing children’s ‘access’ to technology in school and community organisations to close the digital divide, can have unanticipated and inequitable outcomes, such as extracting users’ data and time in the service not of learning goals but of quantifying and tracking students for the purposes of administrative surveillance, discipline, or the profit of platform companies (Ciccone 2022; Crooks 2021). In a time of growing platform power, where, some have argued, digital platforms are accruing so much influence so as to assume a ‘statelike dominance’ over our lives (Lehdonvirta 2022), it is urgent to understand how students’ interactions with technology in and beyond schools constitute a kind of governance–not only over their learning and behaviour in the classroom, but over their personal data and autonomy in the years to come (Kerssens and van Dijck 2022).

With a focus on the technology of standardised testing, Joakim Landahl (2023, this issue) addresses the international circulation of data collected in large-scale student assessment. Landahl’s account enriches our understanding of the transnational processes by which data was scanned, stored, and shipped before the era of the World Wide Web, and how mistrust in data collection and computers as a biased technology has always accompanied the emergence of international student testing and comparison. By looking at standardised testing from a different angle, and comparing developments in England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia, Vincente Reyes et al. (2023, this issue) show how technologies reflect co-existing historical and temporal influences, and global cultural and spatial flows; these ‘datascapes’ run counter to meritocratic ideals. Methodologically, the authors demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches to illuminating histories of educational technology, mobilising Latour’s actor network theory and Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ to describe how modern testing systems are rooted in, and rearticulate, colonial legacies of inequality. Patricia Ferrante et al. (2023, this issue), in turn, make a strong case for global research collaboration in comparative studies. By analysing documents from six countries, they show how an imaginary of ‘digital education’ emerged as a theme within political agendas in different world regions at the end of the twentieth century. The article invites us not only to develop the study of the global reach of sociotechnical imaginaries, but also to critically examine how hype cycles, trends, and promises for improvement in the future can sometimes be synchronised across borders.

To study educational technologies is to encounter ideas about the future. But when we ignore the roads travelled with technology in the past, we also overlook the diversity of places to which they have led. Whether discussing the prospect of improving students’ learning outcomes, administrators’ efficiency, or teachers’ effectiveness, both boosters and critics of ‘ed-tech’ often engage in a kind of forward-looking speculation, generating ‘hype and euphoria’ about the anticipated changes that new technologies will bring to teaching and learning (Hof 2023; Macgilchrist 2021, 246). In a deeply-researched and visually rich study of Estonia’s exhibit to showcase this nation’s vision of the technologised classroom at the ‘Expo2020’ world’s fair, Michael Forsman et al. (2023, this issue) reveal how industrial and cultural visions for the future via technology converge in education, and how this vision was an attempt to break with this country’s past of being part of the Soviet bloc, by seeking to generate a narrative that was more oriented towards the traditions of Northern European countries, as well as to include a perspective of ‘the West’.

Outlook: how local and global histories offer grounding as we look ahead

While future-oriented ‘edtech imaginaries’ have been a recurring feature of the media landscape for over a century, spanning efforts to incorporate movies, radio, television, teaching machines, and personal computers into schools, they have become particularly prevalent in recent decades, amid the proliferation of digital technologies and, more recently, the rise of virtual learning in the covid-19 pandemic and advances in artificial intelligence tools (Dussel 2022; Ferster 2014; Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020). In this era of ‘Big EdTech’, corporations, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and automated products such as facial recognition and ChatGPT, have sparked renewed hopes and concerns about technology’s potential to transform education (Nichols and Garcia 2022; Williamson 2022).

In this moment of renewed speculation about educational technology’s future, much of it rooted in the product promotions and narratives of Western start-ups, industrial hubs and venture capital firms (Veletsianos and Houlden 2023; Williamson and Komljenovic 2023), scholars have an opportunity to contextualise educational technologies as a field of discursive and material practice with geographically and culturally diverse, entangled, and underexamined roots. Writing global and local histories of educational technology entails a widening of reading and citation practices in academic scholarship and redressing a pattern of privileging European and U.S. perspectives at the expense of others, particularly in the Global South (Macgilchrist, Potter, and Williamson 2022; Mertala, Moens, and Teräs 2022). It requires addressing spatial hierarchies, ‘counter-hegemonic narratives’ (Balbi and Magaudda 2018, 214), and interpreting ‘official’ archives in dialogue with the oral histories and accounts of teachers, students, and communities on the ground.

While no special issue can sufficiently cover its topic, the following studies offer insights and points of connection for a conversation that should continue and grow. Further research could consider the historical and contemporary development of non-Western epistemologies; intersectional approaches to learning with technologies; Indigenous communities’ practices of media production and use: moments of everyday resistance, disconnection and non-use in relation to technology in education; matters of automation, standardisation, and surveillance in instructional technologies; legal challenges to technology industries; or grassroots activism by educators and young people to shape products and practices within and beyond the frameworks of industry and governmental regulation.

We would like to express our gratitude for the tremendous support that brought this special issue into being. It builds on the efforts and dedication of numerous authors, the support of the editorial board of Learning, Media and Technology, and the feedback of reviewers from the fields of media history; history of education; history of science; Asian, African, U.S., and European history; science and technology studies; communication studies; computer science; education; learning sciences; and others. If this broad representation of disciplines, analytical angles, and critical perspectives gives us hints about the direction of future inquiry into the past of educational technologies, it is promising.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).