Postgraduate Course: Digital Education in the Majority World: Concepts, Technologies, and Methods (EDUA11448)
Course Outline
| School | Moray House School of Education and Sport |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines specific sociocultural concepts that might be used to frame digital education such as jugaad, ujamaa, buen vivir, and ushahidi, indigenous and contextually appropriate technologies, and their role in the development of digital education that has fidelity to the lived experiences of local communities. These concepts potentially unlock alternatives to how digital education is imagined and performed: jugaad, a Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu word emphasises non-conventional, frugal innovation; ujamaa, a concept emerging from Tanzania maintains a strong focus on community orientation and self-reliance; buen vivir, emerging from the indigenous peoples of the Andes, stresses community-centric, ecologically balanced and culturally sensitive; and ushahidi, a Kiswahili word for "testimony" or "witness", is characterised by being highly participatory and community oriented.
This course is designed to provide space to critique the dominant modes of knowledge production in digital education, and to explore alternatives to this that are a: responsive to the needs and material realities of the local context b: non-uniform in adhering to the increasingly normalised models of global digital education, and c: community and climate responsive. This course is designed for those with a particular interest in how digital education is or might be imagined in the Global South as well as traditionally marginalised populations elsewhere, such as rural communities, displaced populations, and more. |
| Course description |
This course examines specific sociocultural concepts that might be used to frame digital education such as jugaad, ujamaa, buen vivir, and ushahidi, indigenous and contextually appropriate technologies, and their role in the development of digital education that has fidelity to the lived experiences of local communities. These concepts potentially unlock alternatives to how digital education is imagined and performed: jugaad, a Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu word emphasises non-conventional, frugal innovation; ujamaa, a concept emerging from Tanzania maintains a strong focus on community orientation and self-reliance; buen vivir, emerging from the indigenous peoples of the Andes, stresses community-centric, ecologically balanced and culturally sensitive; and ushahidi, a Kiswahili word for "testimony" or "witness", is characterised by being highly participatory and community oriented.
This course is designed to provide space to critique the dominant modes of knowledge production in digital education, and to explore alternatives to this that are a: responsive to the needs and material realities of the local context b: non-uniform in adhering to the increasingly normalised models of global digital education, and c: community and climate responsive.
The course is designed to provide practical and actionable skills with a broader range of methodological approaches. These methods will provide the students with a: exposure to a range of methods that they might employ on their dissertation later in the programme and b: practical experience with methods that can be used in professional contexts, particularly with underserved or traditionally marginalised communities.
The course features research-led teaching, significant student interaction, and discussion of its core themes across several different technological spaces. The course will be hosted on Moodle where select discussion will take place; this will be complemented by Zotero, where students will engage in group activities towards the creation of a collaborative research artefact by the end of the course.
In keeping with the theme of localised configurations of technology, students will be asked to perform methodological work with several technologies of increasing use in the Global South: participatory mapping applications; mobile authoring platforms designed to create engagement with particularly marginalised or vulnerable communities; and learning management systems that provide offline/online access to curriculum and education content for areas with poor connectivity are examples of technologies the course will engage with.
Students will be asked to reflect on and critique these experiences in each of these technological spaces and relate them to the core literature the course is exploring. They will be encouraged to consider the broader social and political implications of these digital technologies and the role that participatory and design methodologies might have in further populating the field of digital education with examples that have fidelity to the lived experiences of underrepresented audiences.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Prerequisite of background knowledge in the field of digital education or professional experience in this field |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate an ability to critique the impact of digital technologies on the ¿territory¿ of education in localised contexts;
- IApply critical analysis to issues informed by a range of sociocultural concepts used to frame digital education;
- Effectively discuss, analyse, and evaluate key issues related to digital education as practiced in localised contexts, demonstrating the conventions of academic discourse; and
- Use a wide range of participatory methods and technologies with some fidelity to digital education as practiced in select contexts.
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Reading List
Indicative Readings
Datta, A., & Thomas, A. (2021). Curating# AanaJaana [# ComingGoing]: gendered authorship in the contact zone of Delhi's digital and urban margins. cultural geographies. doi.org/10.1177/1474474021993415
Escobar, A. (2019). Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. In Knowledges born in the struggle (pp. 41-57). London: Routledge.
Gallagher, M., & Knox, J. (2019). Global technologies, local practices. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(3), 225-234.
Gumbo, M. T. (2015). Indigenous technology in technology education curricula and teaching. In The future of technology education (pp. 57-75). Singapore: Springer.
Pérez-García, L. (2021). The ICT-Buen Vivir Paradox: Using Digital Tools to Defend Indigenous Cultures. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09952. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Characteristic 1: Knowledge and Understanding: on completion of the course, students will have the ability to demonstrate and/or work with knowledge that covers and integrates most, if not all, of the main areas of the subject/discipline/sector ¿ including their features, boundaries, terminology and conventions. This is done through activity along several parallel lines of inquiry: research, conceptual framing, localised technology, and methodological experimentation. This course will engage students in a critical understanding of the principal theories, concepts and principles, and a range of specialised theories, concepts and principles (ujamaa, jugaad, ushahidi, buen vivir). The course is designed to engender a critical awareness of current issues in a subject/discipline/sector and one or more specialisms.
Characteristic 2: Practice: Applied Knowledge, Skills, and Understanding Apply knowledge, skills and understanding: on completion of the course, students will have the ability to use a significant range of the principal professional skills, techniques, practices and/or materials associated with the subject/discipline/sector. In the course, this is engendered through critical technological and methodological experimentation with approaches of common use in the field. This methodological experimentation also allows for the student to be able to apply a range of standard and specialised research and/or equivalent instruments and techniques of enquiry.
Characteristic 4: Communication, ICT, and Numeracy. On completion of the course, students will have the ability to communicate, using appropriate methods, to a range of audiences with different levels of knowledge/expertise. This is most readily engendered on the course through the assessments, which are designed to be knowledge artefacts in and of themselves that speak to diverse audiences. Further, the course is explicit about the use of a wide range of ICT applications to support and enhance work at this level and adjust features to suit purpose. |
| Keywords | digital education,majority world,Global South,marginalised populations,indigenous technology |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Michael Gallagher
Tel: (0131 6)51 7112
Email: Michael.S.Gallagher@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Annemarijn Huizinga
Tel:
Email: ahuizing@ed.ac.uk |
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