Category: LRNT 523

Access is key. The pandemic that began in 2020 showed that universal access is needed for students to not only learn, but to avoid learning losses. This especially true in developing countries where access to both healthcare and education has never been equal to more developed countries. In this speculative future, a new world hegemony for education will be outlined that will have gained momentum because of a world pandemic, but that had its roots in a plan that was begun many years before and for which a framework was laid out that awaited only the opportunity to execute it.

2030:

It has been a long decade, and one of the most chaotic in the history of civilization.

The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 was the start of the change for African students. Historically, Africa had been seen by western governments as a source of human and mineral capital to support colonization plans and global wars between various kingdoms. As US influence decreased during and after the pandemic as described in long cycle theory (Harkavy, 1999), China took advantage of western chaos in public health to step into the void and shift African politics from a Euro-centric physical enslavement of Africa to a China-centric technological and ideological one. The distribution of vaccines became the key to improving trust by Africa in China and was the turning point that finally allowed African students the access to technology they have so desperately needed to take a place on the global stage. First, there needed to be room for them to grow into. That came from the west in an unexpected side-effect of democracy.

Social chaos reigned in the democratic west from 2020-2026, with battling factions of pro- and anti- vaccine groups arguing, mostly online for the first couple of years. Their arguments finally spilled over into street riots in many countries in 2026, as well as civil war in some others, with many governments invoking martial law as they ran out of means of dealing with social problems. Overlapping democratic election cycles, often interrupted by periods of martial law, also permitted a rise in nationalistic sentiment that further inflamed conflict in some countries and permitted waves of ever more lethal virus mutations to ravage unvaccinated populations. All this foreground drama occurred against a background of exhausted and ever more quiet public health voices calling for sound scientific decisions to be taken. This also left little money in western university coffers for higher education investments or international student inclusion.

At the same time, China used its quick (Ritchie et al., 2021) vaccine distribution program to stabilize the pandemic domestically. It then doggedly continued its technological expansion by the creation of more affordable educational technology that was distributed along with much-needed vaccines across Africa. Sino-African relations, most importantly the inclusion of African students in Chinese universities, grew exponentially, which followed a trend that was started more than two decades before (Obamba, 2013). The Chinese economy, once estimated to surpass that of the USA by 2028 (BBC, 2020), overtook it in 2025 due to the negative debt ratings incurred by western countries after massive COVID relief spending decimated their budgets. The ability of China to distribute effective vaccines effectively to vulnerable countries in Africa went a long way to discouraging the idea that “China was up to no good” (Kinyondo, 2019). When the COVID-19 pandemic finally burned itself out in the west in 2026, China was well-poised to take an even more dominant role in the tech world and effectively became the only supplier for educational tech such as computers, processing chips, internet servers, leaving western educational institutions reeling from their lack of choices and now second place position as trading partner of choice. China took advantage of this newfound goodwill and international trust and used it to launch the next phase of its two-pronged plan for global educational domination.

The stockpiling of microchips (BBC, 2020 and BBC, 2020a) and development and distribution of internet infrastructure and tablet computers, then the rebuilding of the Confucius Institute program were the two pillars on which China’s African educational expansion plans rested.

After US sanctions were implemented in 2024 during the US election campaign that prevented China from accessing most of the western supply of microchips, China was well-poised to use its influence in Africa to strike contracts to manufacture microchips using African mining and manufacturing infrastructure. This social licence came after its wildly successful vaccine campaign (that also included distribution of the new malaria vaccine (WHO, 2021)). China then used its management role in African mining and manufacturing to help African students gain access to educational technologies like reliable electricity, cellular telephones, and internet access. Increased student attendance in schools occurred both in Africa, as well as by African students in Chinese universities. Since Africa was able to supply raw materials to support Chinese technology manufacturing in exchange for the end-product technology and internet access that students need, previously underserved populations were lifted out of poverty and into the global stage in a meaningful way. The final step came by the redevelopment of the Confucius Institute (CI) program.

China finally gained control over African schools by educating African students using its CI program (Freuda-Kwartang, 2020), which came to include the provision of technology that African students need after it was overhauled. Importantly, this also includes the cultural “propaganda tools” that came with the technology (BBC, 2019). CI predated the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic provided the leverage China needed to be taken more seriously on the global stage. Since the early 21^st century, China has used its Confucius Institutes to deliberately expand cultural and economic influence, with varying degrees of success between the developing world and the developed world (Wu, 2018). In response to the opinion that China harbored African colonisation plans (Fredua-Kwarteng , 2020), China got better at discretion. Students in Africa benefitted from Chinese technology provision, but the opacity of the Chinese state’s policies continued to make it difficult to understand the extent of the provision of tech vs. the true cost, which continues into the new decade.

As of late 2030, China continues its play for world education domination through the opportunistic use of African need for education and Chinese need for global acceptance and access to raw materials. The next decade will show China’s true colors as the new African colonizer or not, as a global power successor to the western colonization of Africa that took place through the previous centuries.

 

 

References:

BBC, 2019. Confucius Institutes: The growth of China’s controversial cultural branch. (2019, September 6). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49511231

BBC, 2020. China takes aim at US “bullying” of its tech firms. (2020, September 8). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54052765

BBC, 2020. Chinese economy to overtake US “by 2028” due to Covid. (2020, December 26). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55454146

BBC, 2020. Huawei: “Survival is the goal” as it stockpiles chips. (2020, September 23). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54266531

Fredua-Kwarteng, E. (2020). What is China’s higher education agenda in Africa? (n.d.). University World News. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201120110117700

Harkavy, R. E. (1999). Long cycle theory and the hegemonic powers’ basing networks. Political Geography, 18(8), 941–972. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(99)00033-5

Hilbert, M. (2020). Digital technology and social change: The digital transformation of society from a historical perspective. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(2).

Kinyondo, A. (2019). Is China Recolonizing Africa? Some Views from Tanzania. World Affairs, 182(2), 128–164. https://doi.org/10.1177/0043820019839331

OECD, 2016. Education in China: A Snapshot. OECD. Retrieved October 30, 2021, from https://www.oecd.org/china/Education-in-China-a-snapshot.pdf

Obamba, M. (2013). The Dragon’s Deal: Sino-African Cooperation in Higher Education. International Higher Education, (72), 7-8. https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2013.72.6102

Ritchie, H., Mathieu, E., Rodés-Guirao, L., Appel, C., Giattino, C., Ortiz-Ospina, E., Hasell, J., Macdonald, B., Beltekian, D., & Roser, M. (2020). Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19). Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

University World News, 2020. What is China’s higher education agenda in Africa? (21 November, 2020) Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201120110117700

WHO, 2021. WHO recommends groundbreaking malaria vaccine for children at risk. (6 October, 2021) Retrieved October 30, 2021, from https://www.who.int/news/item/06-10-2021-who-recommends-groundbreaking-malaria-vaccine-for-children-at-risk

Wu, H. (2019). Three dimensions of China’s “outward-oriented” higher education internationalization. Higher Education, 77(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0262-1

 

In the absence of a good fortune-telling app, one guess is as good as another, so I thought I would look at long cycles (social cycle theory), as described by George Modelski (Harkavy, 1999), but using education rather than economics and studying how education technology might be related to Kondratiev waves in technology life cycles (Ayres, 1988). Specifically, I want to discuss China’s possible hegemonic accession as a potential defining trait of the 21^st century (BBC, 2020). I also want to understand how an education-based trade and information war, rather than traditional war could lift Africa out of the prison of poverty using Chinese support (Fredua-Kwarteng, 2020). Given that some theories suggest that our next technological revolution with be in information (Hilbert, 2020), countries that invest heavily in education and technology should be able to influence world power.

 

In 2030:

Social chaos reigned in the democratic west from 2020-2026, with battling factions of pro- and anti- vaccine groups arguing, mostly online for the first couple of years. Their arguments finally spilled over into street riots in many countries in 2026 that many governments put down by force. In the meantime, China doggedly continued its technological expansion by the creation of more affordable technology that was distributed, along with much-needed vaccines, across Africa. Sino-African relations, most importantly the inclusion of African students in Chinese universities, grew exponentially. The Chinese economy, once estimated to surpass that of the USA by 2028 (BBC, 2020), overtook it in 2025 due to the negative debt ratings incurred by western countries after massive COVID relief spending decimated their budgets. This left little money in western university coffers for higher education R&D for technology improvements.

 

References:

Ayres, R. U. (1988). Barriers and breakthroughs: An “expanding frontiers” model of the technology-industry life cycle. Technovation, 7(2), 87–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-4972(88)90041-7

Chinese economy to overtake US “by 2028” due to Covid. (2020, December 26). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55454146

Fredua-Kwarteng, E. (2020). What is China’s higher education agenda in Africa? (n.d.). University World News. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201120110117700

Harkavy, R. E. (1999). Long cycle theory and the hegemonic powers’ basing networks. Political Geography, 18(8), 941–972. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(99)00033-5

Hilbert, M. (2020). Digital technology and social change: The digital transformation of society from a historical perspective. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(2).

 

Earlier this year, I was introduced to an online training program called Hollaback that was brought to my workplace (virtually) to provide training on interventions to stop street harassment (Hollaback, n.d.). Hollaback has created a decentralized feminist community of practice using technology to assist storytelling, a “key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements” (Dimond, et al, 2013). They commissioned the creation of a mobile application and website to aid their work. 

Hollaback’s mobile application and blog/storytelling website were created by Sassafras Tech Collective, which is a worker cooperative group owned by Dr. Jill Dimond, who holds a PhD in Human Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, and her partners (Sassafras, 2020). I chose Dr. Dimond because she embodies the intersection of education, technology, and feminism in her work. She specializes in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Her PhD dissertation sought to “provide empirical evidence on how technology impacts activists” (Dimond, 2012). Sassafras Tech Collective even borrows pedagogical approaches in their day-to-day work, adopting a workplace version of critical pedagogy in their mutual work mentorship (Sassafras, 2020). Dr. Dimond maintains an active Twitter account, where she consistently promotes those same values of social equality and just cooperative work in the tech sector.

As Audrey Watters said, “this is really the crux of my message: there’s a fascinating and important history of education technology that is largely forgotten, that is largely hidden” (Watters, 2014) and I hope that Dr. Dimond is not hidden, or erased (Dimond, 2021).

Links:

Sassafras Tech Collective Blog: https://blog.sassafras.coop/

Dr. Jill Dimond Twitter: https://twitter.com/jpdimond

References:

Jill Dimond, PhD. (2021, August 3). The worst is when other women who work at large tech companies have done this to me, and they don’t even realize it because of how they are situated within institutional power. [Tweet]. @jpdimond. https://twitter.com/jpdimond/status/1422580472501178371

Dimond, J. (2012). Feminist HCI for real: designing technology in support of a social movement. Page 32. 

Hollaback! Together We Have the Power to End Harassment. Get Trained. (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://www.ihollaback.org/harassmenttraining/

Sassafras. (2020, February 27). Welcome to our new blog!.https://blog.sassafras.coop/welcome-to-our-new-blog/

Watters, A. (2014, June 18). Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech #CETIS14. Hack Education. http://hackeducation.com/2014/06/18/unfathomable-cetis2014

At the risk of sounding repetitive, the pandemic has made us force our offline lives online faster than we expected. I wrote about this when discussing Fully Online Learning Communities (FOLC) in May 2021 (Houldsworth, 2021). Weller (2020, p. 100) discussed “overenthusiastic initial adoption” of online worlds in Chapter 14 for 2007. He suggests that “virtual worlds for learning may be one of those technologies due for a comeback”. I agree with him, but perhaps not for the reasons he expected when he wrote that. Fortnite and the attempts by Silicon Valley to develop online worlds (Park, 2020) have provided a space for those who can and want to migrate their lives online, partly to avoid contagion and partly because they prefer it. I would argue that it is a smaller step now for schools to follow. As the pandemic continues to drag on, online life continues to pull us forward, while our old life tries to hold us back.

The concept of sludge (Thaler & Sunstein, 2021) or sedimentation (Weller, 2020) refers to the idea that administrative structures “accrue around the system” (Lanier, 2002, p. 222), making change difficult. In my professional life, I am living it due to the way that our systems have developed. When we were first required to work from home, simply accessing anything online was virtually impossible, which made regulating (a legally required activity!), let alone learning, very difficult. The very real risk of lack of nuclear regulatory oversight could have existed, which contradicts how we see ourselves. An organization can try very hard to be agile, but due to years of sedimentation, it cannot pivot very quickly, even when it thinks of itself as modern and responsive. Weller (2020) said, “it is necessary to be aware of every institutional action that adds to the sediment and to be aware that the greater the accrual of such sediment, the more difficult it becomes to implement, or even contemplate, other solutions” (p. 66). Throughout 2020, we watched the LMS, the regulatory activity databases, and even the processes used for hearings struggle along in the sludge, along with the people who use them. Thankfully, senior management is recognizing this now and making meaningful, forward-looking changes so that we won’t get caught again.

 

References:

Houldsworth, C. (2021, May 8). One Week (or maybe a Fortnite?) https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0208/one-week-or-maybe-a-fortnite/

Park, G. (2020, April 17). Silicon Valley is racing to build the next version of the Internet. Fortnite might get there first. Washington Post. Retrieved May 7, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/17/fortnite-metaverse-new-internet/

Thaler, R., Sunstein, C. (2021). Nudge: the final edition. Penguin Books.

Weller, Martin (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Canada: Athabasca University Press.

The very readable and friendly, “25 Years of Ed Tech” beautifully describes my professional journey to date. Prior to reading the first third of the book, I knew my own lived experiences with Ed Tech, but I was surprised at how he perfectly encapsulated what I suspected about certain aspects of it. These include how constructivism has a place somewhere but not everywhere, the development of e-learning, and the appearance of digital diploma mills.

As a radiation expert, I agree that constructivism is “an approach that doesn’t apply equally across all disciplines; quantum physics, for example, is almost entirely theoretical and largely counter-intuitive, so bringing your own experience of quarks isn’t going to help” (Weller, 2020, p.30). Even now, critical safety training such as nuclear power plant operations continues to rely on a more traditional method of teaching, which is what I believe Weller meant. Constructivist learning, as well as e-learning, remain generally unpopular in the nuclear realm in my experience.

E-learning when present in nuclear remains asynchronous, low-risk, and regulatory box-checking. Weller provided the cost-effectiveness of e-learning thus: “software simulations are costly to produce, taking time and requiring the input of a range of experts. However, once made, these components are relatively cheap to reproduce, so the costs do not increase greatly as the number of students increases. This model … is well-suited to large population courses which are presented over several years without much alteration” (Weller, 2020, p. 46). I have seen this first-hand and a quick Google search for online safety training backs me up.

As the century progressed, I saw organizations whose officers are described by Reid in 1959 as “unethical self-seekers whose qualifications are no better than their offerings” (Noble, 1998, p. 368). I was unfortunately surprised by Weller’s and Noble’s works to learn that my hunches about this group were right.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Weller’s book has so far described the history of Ed Tech and look forward to connecting his future revelations to my lived experiences.

References:

Noble, D. F. (1998). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. Science as Culture, 7(3), 355–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439809526510

Weller, Martin (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Canada: Athabasca University Press.