Are "modernization" and "westernization" synonyms? Is "modern" technology essentially a "western" - i.e. Euro-American - invention? These are important questions for students and teachers to consider, especially in today's rapidly globalizing socioeconomic milieu.

However, not much thought seems to have been given to questions such as these within the mainstream scholarly discourse in the field of educational technology. On the other hand, many educational technologists appear to operate under some remarkably unshakeable, albeit often unstated, assumptions in this regard.

What I was taught about the history of educational technology in particular - and the history of human progress in general - at my alma mater in the United States can be candidly summed up as follows: (a) Human civilization and intellectual activities essentially began in ancient Greece; (b) Ancient Rome took on the mantle of advancing human civilization in subsequent centuries; (c) Then came the Dark Ages, where nobody thought or did much; (d) Eventually the gloom lifted with the Renaissance in Europe, which subsequently spawned the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment across Europe and North America; and finally (e) the Space Age/Technological Revolution/Digital Age coincided with the American Century.

Notably absent from the above timeline is any discussion of the contribution of non-western peoples - Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Arab, African - to human progress. My discomfort with this state of affairs grew through the semester, finally coming to a head when the professor began to wax eloquent about how Johannes Gutenberg first invented movable type. Now I knew this to be really not true; I had just returned from Korea where I had seen a metal movable type system invented around two centuries before Gutenberg. So I stood up and challenged the professor's claims.

And while I was at it I also asked, why is it we never talk about the contributions of non-western cultures to human civilization? Don't you know the modern numeric system was devised by Indians? Don't you know that algebra is essentially an Arab invention? And so on. His response was simple: There certainly might be contributions made by the cultures you speak of, however they have not been documented properly and therefore it is impossible to discuss them in an academic setting.

Not been documented properly? Maybe not in the books he read, I guess...