A Critical Analysis of Media Discourse on a Western Cape Schools ICT Project: Khanya

Governments and donor agencies have been embarking on ICT initiatives to implement ICT projects in schools. One such project is Khanya, an ICT initiative of the Western Cape Department of Education, South Africa. The key objective of the project is to assist in implementing ICT for curriculum delivery in the schools in the province. The project has received substantial media coverage. This media coverage is of academic interest since media has the power to influence public perceptions which in turn influences the public's attitudes towards an innovation. In this paper, we use Habermasian Theory of Communicative Action to analyse and uncover distortions in the media discourse on the Khanya project. Our findings show that the media discourse on the project is fraught with distortions. The findings substantiate previous research on media discourse that media discourse pushes propaganda to the effect that technological uptake and adoption is crucial and inevitable. We argue that these distortions might have, in a way, contributed to project uptake failure in some schools. We adopt the position that it is possible that teachers and students didn't have a realistic view of what the project entailed in terms of financial and time costs as well as necessary skills to ensure successful uptake. The findings of this study could form part of the recommendations for agencies responsible to implementing ICT projects for education.