And going through the issue.
And for those that didn't know you
and John is a nurse co-chairing, innovative, informal digital
learning in these advantages and development contexts.
He's a professor of digital learning, a founding director
of the International Association of for Mobile Learning.
So thank you, John,
for your participation, and you can share your screen.
Okay.
Well, I have some explanation and some thanks
and some apology.
I am actually awaiting
surgery after a serious injury,
so I haven't been able to prepare as much as I'd like.
And unfortunately, I need to leave
for my first physiotherapy
at the prescribed time. So.
Several apologies.
Also, our chair is relatively new
and higher education in the UK
has gone under considerable turbulence.
And so what I can talk about is some of the projects
and some of the papers that have informed
our thinking and have underpinned out
the principles that were that we're working on.
I mean, in fact, the title for the UNESCO's Chair
Innovative Informal Digital Learning for disadvantaged
Aid and Development Context pretty much sums it up.
That's probably why it's such a long and complex title,
because it's an attempt to really say all in one phrase,
and it grows out of work
in various places with various learners.
At the moment,
the most obvious one, because of current
geopolitical events is work with UNWRA,
the United Nations agency that works
with the Palestinian refugee communities.
And we were responsible several years ago for formulating
an education strategy and e-learning strategy, in fact,
that attempted to work
with the various constraints
under which education in Palestine
and Gaza and Lebanon and Syria and Jordan
operates.
And clearly some of those constraints
are infrastructure, connectivity,
buildings and mains electricity.
And those are constraints shared with some of the other communities
that we have worked with for example, upland communities
in Kenya or indigenous
communities in Canada.
And that perhaps has been one of the underlying
concerns for us.
But much of what we see as
edtech
is it coming from
the top, coming from the center,
coming from the mainstream
of the global north
or of individual nation states.
And our concern has always been that the way EdTech
and education systems operate
has been inclined to continue
to privilege the already privileged.
And so a lot of the work we've done has been an attempt
to redress that imbalance and to ask
how do we reach the hard to reach?
How do we try
to understand the hard to reach?
How can we support what they want to do, what they want to learn,
rather than continuing to broadcast
what we want to teach them?
We've done work with the Commonwealth of Learning
and with the International Telecommunications Union,
one based in Vancouver, the other based in Geneva,
both of whom
from an organizational
mission,
have felt the need
or the opportunity to use MOOCs to reach different kinds
of disadvantaged communities in the Global South.
And our perspective
has always been that
this represents
the mass production of learning
undifferentiated content
and might classic example
in working with these organizations and in trying trying to develop ideas
that will support different kinds of marginal nomadic indigenous
communities
has been to point out that
my colleagues and I, we found a YouTube video,
a farmer standing in a field in Ghana
with his mobile phone
uploaded the video in which he talks about how him and his friends
and neighbors grow better yams.
And we found other video uploaded by a similar small scale
local farmers in Senegal talking
about how they grow ginger and
the point I try to
make to these organizations who want to broadcast from,
if you like, their offices in Geneva
or Vancouver, is this man, is there,
this man is living it, this man is doing it.
Do we really think
that us in the global north, in our offices in Geneva,
are going to tell him how to grow yams?
And so it's kind of a graphic example of
where we in our UNESCO's
chair are coming from.
We have also worked I mean, thanks to colleagues
in Usenet, in fact, in Madrid, worked with refugees
traveling across Europe and trying to,
I don't know, maybe be assimilated into European communities
or maybe maintain their own cultural identity
and looked at how they have wanted to learn
and what have been the affordances or the opportunities
for them learning.
And it's clearly very obvious, but it's always very obvious
that people already own and use the technologies of learning
and already do a lot of learning.
It might be not.
The technology is that we in the EdTech community
prescribe for them and it might not be
what we in the education profession prescribe for them,
but they are already out there doing what they need.
And again, so it's been our mission to think about
how can we support that rather than how can we override that.
And again, we've worked with community is, as I say, highland
or upland communities in Kenya
with indigenous communities
in Borneo in Canada.
And one of the things we've been doing is building a
global network.
What this has informed has been the,
if you like, founding principles,
the if you like, blinding,
obvious observations that amount to our starting points
in working with these kinds of communities.
And I've already hinted at them.
In fact, the first one is that pretty much everyone,
pretty much everyone in every community
is already using
mobile phones and perhaps tablets or laptops,
but they're certainly already using mobile phones
and they're using them for social media,
most often all sorts of social media
and Web 2.0 applications.
And what they are doing
is generating their own ideas,
information, images, opinions,
and in many cases generating their own identities.
And they're not only generating all of this stuff,
but they're also sharing it and
discussing it,
merging it, transforming it,
recycling it, broadcasting it.
And, you know, if you if you want to be suspicious, specific,
I can say, look, look in YouTube, look at Facebook, look at Twitter.
And clearly we
all have reservations about, if you like, platform capitalism,
digital capitalism, digital neo capitalism, digital neo colonialism,
about how these different platforms and systems are owned and controlled.
But for many people, it's what's obvious.
It's what's easy.
It's what they feel comfortable with.
And again, as I often point out, what's the first thing
my students at university do when they graduate?
Stop using Moodle.
You know, and if we look at formal education,
we see an enormous amount of money
being invest and effort and time being invested in developing
these dedicated edtech systems, training people
to use them, paying for the licenses, developing the content.
And one of our points a different foundational
principle is actually the content is already out there.
The world is not short of content.
It might be short of the skills to find the right content,
to find the stuff that you like that you need.
But it's not short of content and nor is it
short of apps or tools.
But certainly the stuff is already out there,
the content is already out there
and people are accessing it
within perhaps
Facebook groups
or Twitter hashtags.
They're
developing their own communities, which have their own ideas about
what is worth learning, what are the appropriate ways to interact,
how do you join this community, all of those kinds of things.
Already it's happening.
You could say, well, perhaps in the words of Mr.
Spock, I think that it's learning, but not as we know it.
Captain
And there's a lot of it.
And I'm not endorsing it.
I'm not saying it's good learning
what people do with social media, but I'm saying it's it's out there.
And I think it's our responsibility as educators
to reach out there and and work with it.
I mean, as people have pointed out, I think
Apple or Facebook
have a larger economy or a bigger population than Poland.
Um, you know, that's where people are and that's where they're learning
and that's how they're learning in ways they choose
to learn.
So that would be my second foundational principle.
The first one is, as I say, everyone already has technology.
We need both hardware technologies and software technologies.
We need to be developing more.
We certainly don't need to be selling it to them.
They've already got what they need and what they like.
And our second point
is that they're already learning with it.
As I say, it might not be what I in my university institution
recognize as proper learning,
good learning the way I did it.
But it still constitutes
the exchange of ideas, information.
And I suppose sorry,
you could argue it's very low tech, it's not exploiting
the technological opportunities, but I think it might not be exploiting
virtual reality or high resolution graphics.
But I guess our point is that it reaches to the bottom of the pyramid
and I'm not sure,
given the last 50 years whether I trust
any ideas of trickle down,
trickle down economics or trickle
down development or trickle down technology.
I think the last 50 years show
show us that what starts at the top stays at the top.
And so we're trying to work
with things as they are, not things the way we'd like them to be.
And our third point really is
that there are a lot of pedagogies, if you like,
innovative, forward developing ones that we think
can be developed appropriate.
It adapted for different communities and they're different
ideas about learning.
And I won't mention very many of them.
In fact,
I'm happy to talk about them at much, much, much,
much greater length if you if you want to get in touch.
But there is, for example, the idea of curating content
or indeed curating
or orchestrating communities.
You know, there's there are a lot of communities out there already.
Everything from Byzantine history to
obscure zoology, you know. So
we hope that we can
help communities find the right stuff,
organize the right stuff,
share the right stuff,
and discard the right stuff.
And that's that's what we see as our role as
teachers is helping
people learn and turning them into lifelong learners.
So it's not merely three years, five years, seven years of education,
and then you leave the system
hoping that you're going to manage for the rest of your life.
But actually,
at the scale of curating will hopefully get you through
the rest of your life.
And I just mentioned a second one, which is around the idea of user
generated content.
The fact that the what people value most is what talks to them
and what talks to them is what people like them
say or write or do you know?
So how can we value other people's
cultures, indigenous cultures, marginal cultures?
One way we can do that is by helping them express themselves.
I'll just mention two
of the kind of background
or prerequisite activities to this, and one is, of course, that actually
if you look at what EdTech is based on, it's clearly based on EdTech
research and EdTech researchers,
and that basically means that what we do in education
is based on the thinking and the methods of white Europeans,
and that isn't necessarily how anyone else,
probably old white Europeans, actually old white male Europeans.
You know, if you look at depictions of educational theorists,
you might find a picture of Vygotsky,
I think he was from the Euros and
perhaps
sorry, the education of her story
from Brazil, from north east Brazil.
And you might find some women perhaps Diana Laurel out,
but the rest is white male Europeans.
And we don't think that the
the research methods
the research tools, the research ethics are necessarily appropriate
for any other community, any other culture other than that
of actually middle class bourgeois, white male Europeans.
And if we want to understand and support these other peoples
in their learning, we need better
and more authentic research methods that will
help us engage in a conversation
rather than merely answer
the questions that we have.
What are the concerns that they have?
And some recent work for UNESCO's
has perhaps
encapsulated that, and that's looking at the decolonization
of educational technology, I guess, as part of a much wider
movement of decolonization,
repatriation, reparation,
a Black Lives Matter, and also local efforts
in universities to decolonize the curriculum.
But again, it becomes very clear
if any of us
here are looking at our computer interfaces,
just how much of the interaction and the exchange is dominated
by the images, the icons, the interactions,
the language, the fonts of a particular community, probably
the community of Silicon Valley, and how
everything we do on commune on computers
is mediated by
the hegemony of one particular culture.
And we need to find ways of
rebuilding computers, maybe rebuilding computers in ways
that address cultural richness, cultural diversity.
So so those are parts of our mission
and our work within the
university.
UNESCO's Chair that
is hosted at the University of Wolverhampton
and for which I'm the shareholder.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.