The “Gift” of Technology
Technology has revolutionized almost every aspect of life in the Global North. Will that translate to the Global South too?
Over the past 30 years, information communication technologies have seeped into every part of life in the Global North. Phones and computers are used throughout every aspect of daily life; between entertainment, news, education, communication, and digital payments, nearly every aspect of someones day can revolve around technology. But to reach this level of trust with technology, years of socialization led to this deep integration. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, technology took an even firmer grasp on society as it was the only way to communicate, work, and educate safely. This collective experience of moving society online showed the strengths and many weaknesses of how technology was implemented at the time. One of the most notable cases was the education sector.
Researchers have been talking about the education gap between the Global South and Global North for decades. Usually, the solution that researchers offer is implementing more technology into the classrooms of the Global South; though this might be the right idea in the end, the process by which they’ve implemented in previous attempts may have caused more harm than good. They’ve missed the fundamental difference between the two populations; the Global North has had technology in its households since the 1970s and the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari, or Nintendo, and the Global South has never had such a proliferation. Without this time to create a culture around technology, its implementation will never succeed. In order successfully reduce the education gap between the Global North and Global South there will need to be a long process of helping both educators and students get acquainted with the technology.
Computers for Education in the Global North
In the Global North, computers have been around for decades, and they have been socialized into every aspect of daily life; this should afford computers an easier time integrating into the education systems of the Global North. Even though the Global North has a much greater proliferation of technology in society, simply adding technology into the classroom will not guarantee that the quality of education will increase. This was first shown through a study conducted by Mark Warschauer analyzing the implementation of technology into classroom settings in California.
Warschauer sought to study equity in education and how closing the digital divide between different socioeconomic classes would impact education metrics. Over seven months, researchers studied 64 classrooms in eight schools, five from a region of low socioeconomic status and three from high socioeconomic status areas. As part of a program from the Californian government, these schools were given computers and told to use them in their classrooms but given very little instruction on how to. Throughout the seven-month duration of Warschauer’s study, it is clear that the computers showed more of an impact within the education systems that were deemed to be in a higher socioeconomic demographic. This came from a multitude of reasons, but one major point cited is that the higher socioeconomic status schools could afford to have someone help the educators integrate technology into the curriculum. By helping the teachers learn about what the technology can do, it allowed them to better demonstrate to their students how to use it both at school and at home; unfortunately, the lower socioeconomic status were also at a disadvantage when students returned home. At home, students from the lower socioeconomic demographic were less likely to have consistent access to an at home computer, meaning they couldn’t use the skills learned in the classroom when completing their homework.
Computers can revolutionize education, but that can only happen if there is a strategic plan for integrating these technologies into the classroom. In March 2020, every student was across the world was suddenly switched to “distance learning” do to the COVID-19 pandemic, this sudden shift of completing all education in a virtual environment caused an initial decrease in the effectiveness of education. In Michigan, classes were taught through ‘distance learning’ for nearly 22 months, and it took almost half of that to find a groove on how to educate students online. There was no playbook ready to show teachers how to educate in this new manner, and this caused students to suffer from poor education. To ensure that technology is implemented in a way that is beneficial to educators and students, there needs to be a careful, step-by-step plan to aid educators in implementing it into their curriculum.
Computers for Education in the Global South
Technology will eventually end the education divide, but it can’t happen through the presently established systems. Researchers have had the opportunity to introduce technology to the Global South, but the manner of which they have been doing so may have been more harmful than good. Researchers from the Global North have theorized that implementing technology within school systems in the Global South will help decrease the educational divide across the globe; however, when they choose to implement these technologies, it is often without giving any instructions or suggestions to the educators or administrators of the school systems. If this is the strategy that continues to be used, then the educational divide will not close as expected, rather the technology will fall to the waist side and not be used for the intended purpose (like it did already in the Hope-In-The-Wall project)
Previous research that has been done on the Global South and technology, has had very little information regarding how the teachers in these Global South education programs have been introduced to the technologies they are trying to implement in their classrooms. Thus far, in both Hope-in-the-Wall and the One Laptop per Child programs; both programs found little success because they were based on giving educational materials and computer systems to schools, though they did not direct the teachers, administrators, or students on how to use these materials beneficially to education. Both programs were based on the principle that students were intrinsically interested in technology; however, they neglected to consider that this was the first time that many of the test subjects were interacting with technology for the first time, both students and educators.
The Global North had the opportunity to have devices like the Atari, Nintendo, and Magnavox Odyssey in homes since the 1970s, technology gained more ability until the point it is at today. Nearly everyone in the Global North has a smartphone or has to interact with computers in their day-to-day. It took decades for consumers to begin trusting the new technologies that were being implemented, and that transition period is something that needs to be afforded to the Global South as well.
To close the education divide, there will need to be a holistic approach to getting technology into the hands of students. Most of the population of the Global South are going to be “digital immigrants,” a concept that is used to describe people who didn’t have technology around as they were growing up and maturing. However because these technologies will be implemented in areas where the vast majority of people are “digital immigrants” and there are very few, if any, “digital natives.” As a collective society, though likely fueled by younger people, populations from the Global South will have to decide how they want technology to enter their society. As individuals from the Global North offering assistance, it is crucial for us to attentively listen to the needs of the individuals to whom we are providing these technologies.
As shown in the Californian schools’ example, the planning of technological implementation is critical to the success of the project being undertaken. The educators and students need to be kept at the core of the project, but the forces outside school that affect how the technology is utilized needs to be considered too. During the first years One Laptop per Child program, it was found that the computers given to each student weren’t being utilized as the researchers hoped because parents were concerned with the safety of the laptop they were given, meaning that it usually got left at home or school and didn’t travel with the student as hoped. This was a symptom of the parents not fully understanding how to interact with a laptop (i.e., a foreign object to them).
Technology can close the education gap, but that can only happen with a fundamental rethinking of how to do it. As more researchers and nongovernmental organizations begin to help get the Global South online, they need to rethink their process if they seek to have community support. It is crucial to think about how citizens of the Global North and South have fundamentally different upbringings, and they’ll need technological solutions tailored to their experience. Technology, especially if it’s a user’s first time interacting with it, needs to be tailored to the group it will be implemented with. The “it works for us, it’ll work for them,” “one size fits all” mentality needs to change if there is a hope to close the existing educational divide between the Global North and South.
