02.08.2024 | Authors: Soledad Magnone, André Cardozo Sarli, Laís Pinheiro, Yuri, Ketelen, Antônio Gabriel and Paulo
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The campaign “Critical Digital Education for All” (CDE) promotes the debate on the right to quality education in the digital age. Digital education strategies in different regions of the world have been insufficient, favouring an education without critical thinking and oriented towards the ends of the technological labour market. This increased social injustices by favouring the economic and political interests of a small group of technology companies and governments.
CDE was coordinated in collaboration with activists and young people in Latin America for various research, education and advocacy actions. Its main results have materialised in blogs and podcasts, expanding the community in the region. We reiterated the campaign on 4 June 2024 at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) FAccT Conference (Fairness, Accountability and Transparency). We spoke to André Cardozo Sarli, Laís Pinheiro and youth from the Núcleo de Cidadania Adolescente (NUCA) in Vitória da Conquista from UNICEF and the Liga de Jovens Baianos.
Listen to the podcast and access the full transcript in Brazilian Portuguese.
This blog summarises some of the main conclusions of our interactions. We talked about fairer digital futures and activating solutions with activists, teachers, youth and researchers from around the world. João Lordelo, Bahia-based musician, prosecutor and digital rights researcher, provides the music for the podcast.
Laís: We can go in parts: How do you see technologies in your social spaces?
Paulo: (…) We see that not only in our country, but all over the world, we experience a kind of inequality: information, technology, for some people it comes quickly, for others it comes more slowly, and for others it doesn’t come at all, especially people in rural areas. We really experience inequality in terms of technology, and I often say that technology simplifies our lives in some way.
Ketelen: (…) The internet is something that, whether we like it or not, we use constantly and a lot of people are affected by not using it. I am talking about the acquisition of knowledge, better training in education, even in professional and social life.
Soledad: Latin America is the most socially unequal region in the world, where do you learn about these problems and opportunities you are talking about?
Yuri: I tend to learn more at home. I think I learn more at home than at school, I don’t know why. At home, I think you concentrate. (…) There are subjects that, yes, I have to learn at school, that I can learn more easily at school, but there are other subjects that I can learn more at home.
Ketelen: We see this more in secondary school, when it is a technical subject, like computer science, where we have some basis on how the Internet works. We usually learn more at home. On Instagram we see a video of someone talking about it, we get interested, we go to Google and search for it and we get more intensely involved in the subject.
Laís:Do you think there should be more opportunities to explore this world of technology, to see if we can bridge this gap with the social?
Ketelen: I think so. Whether we like it or not, the internet is part of our lives today.
Paulo: I think the impact is even bigger because we are connected to this technology every day. Adults know this too, but we know the real problems we face with technology today. So having an honest and direct discussion with other young people of the same age, in the same age group, has a much bigger impact than the adult talking.
Yuri: I think the pandemic was the time when we used the internet the most, because whether we wanted to or not, we didn’t have contact with other people to relate to, and even, I’ll give my example, during the pandemic, because we had more online classes, it ended up affecting my writing, because I was only writing on my mobile, and when I went back to face-to-face classes, I couldn’t write well, my handwriting was horrible, it wasn’t the best, it even got worse.
André: One question I would like to ask, what did you learn at school?
Antonio Gabriel: Well, in my history class, the teacher didn’t recommend Wikipedia, precisely because there could be false information, because everybody can contribute to the site. And a lot of people can use it in bad faith to, as they say, share false information and whenever we were going to do research, she always asked us to look for reliable sources, articles, things like that.
Yuri: Yes, I don’t know if many of you know the artificial intelligence of WhatsApp, Luzia in my school, until last year they banned the use of mobile phones in class because the students were using the artificial intelligence to answer the activities and to use, when they passed the work and created texts, they would go to Luzia to create the text for them.
André: That’s very interesting to hear. I didn’t even know that WhatsApp artificial intelligence existed. And don’t you find it a bit contradictory that they want you to be educated, they want you to be more tech savvy in a critical way, but they take away your mobile phone?
Antonio Gabriel: (…) I think that, from my point of view, there should be ideal moments to use the mobile phone and moments not to use it. Because, whether you want to or not, at one time or another you can do research that is not in the book. As many books are out of date, it is easier to get information on the internet.
Laís: (…) And, really, sometimes we say, well, the school encourages technology, but it takes my mobile phone out of my hand when I’m in class. But how is this mobile phone going to be used in class? That’s the question, it’s the way it’s used, and not just using it for the sake of using it. It has a purpose, always for the construction of information, always for education.
André: I would like to present some cases for you to discuss briefly: The government of the state of São Paulo, which is a government that has been criticised a lot for wanting to adopt technology, sometimes not very critically. For a while, they no longer wanted to buy physical books, but only digital ones. And that in itself is a problem, because not everybody can afford to read a digital book. The other measure this government took was to use ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, to develop the curriculum. This is one of the problems I wanted to discuss with you: how can we have critical education, given that people in power sometimes use these tools without being very critical, and what would be the problem of having ChatGPT to produce lessons?
Where does the information that Artificial Intelligence (AI) feeds on come from? How do they get this data? What we call ChatGPT’s large linguistic models are designed to pick out the most obvious answers. For example, someone put into Google’s AI “how many grams of ore do you need to survive?”, and it came up with “you need to eat one stone a week”. The second problem is that most of these AIs are trained on data that is not data from our Global South. If you search for indigenous people on Google, ChatGPT or Google today, most of the data that comes up is not data related to our reality in Brazil or Latin America. The third issue, which we already talked about, is that several countries have restrictions on children and adolescents using mobile phones in school. But otherwise, it is being a bit paternalistic, that mobile phones should not be used.
So one of the issues for us to have a critical digital education that is accountable, transparent and fair, is that we have to make an effort so that these companies that are behind it don’t use mobile phones.
Ketelen: What you said reminded me that a lot of times we substitute even a face-to-face doctor’s assessment with Google. I’m sorry, I go to Google and put it in. I have a headache, nausea, stomach ache, what could it be? Google will always come up with something horrible. That you’ve got cancer, that you’ve got that.
Paulo: And I talk a lot about how the metaverse is now emerging along with artificial intelligence on a much larger scale. And then people think that people won’t need to go to companies to work, people won’t need to go to school to study, but this has made it difficult for people to think (…) It’s like you put on virtual reality goggles and you’re there in a totally parallel universe. I’ll give you an example: the metaverse is being used today with NASA to lay the groundwork for the journey to Mars.
Yuri: People often focus so much on the internet and their mobile phones that they forget that the outside world exists. Also in their intellectual involvement and their psychological involvement. Because often, as I used the example of Instagram, you go on Instagram and everybody has a perfect life, nobody gets sick, nobody gets sick.
Soledad: What do you think, what recommendation could you make, from the final reflections on critical digital education from your points of view and the conversation today?
Paulo: Using it with awareness is really going to have a great effect and it’s going to bring a great development within us here and also in other areas. But it has to be used with awareness.
Yuri: As Paulo Vinícius said, that we use the internet with awareness and that we realise that yes, it has its good points and its bad points as well.
Ketelen: One person doesn’t make a difference. Several people do. So if we come together, if we come together and fight for a knowledgeable society so that we can have a more capable generation in the future, a society with even better welfare.
Antonio Gabriel: I would also like to point out that schools should also warn parents, especially teenagers who get into these games like, say, Roblox, Free Fire, because there are a lot of people there who use bad faith to seduce children, among other things. So I think that schools should also play an essential role in warning students about digital education, as well as parents, since this is very important.
Laís: Sometimes it is not just about acquiring, it is not just about us. But you are also concerned and constructively criticize the use of these technologies that, as you have said, you use. You use these technologies for yourselves, but you also think that this can be very dangerous if you do not know how to use them. And families also have to be aware of this dialogue.
André: We have the topic of education, which has some problems, such as the lack of focus on critical digital education in the curriculum, and the involvement of the third sector and the articulation of NGOs, of adolescent initiatives. The excellent work of NUCA, the adolescents, I learned a lot today. This is already one of the best ways to carry out critical digital education, sharing this information and establishing links.
Soledad: Thank you for the information. I am very grateful to you, it is an honor to speak with you. The Critical Digital Education campaign can be translated, but not simply translated, but modified, and how you want the campaign to continue.
Would you like to join this conversation?
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Follow the Critical Digital Education for All campaign on the website and social media of JAAKLAC and its partner organizations #digitaleducation #educaciondigital #educaçaodigital
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Find out more about NUCA (#nucavitóriadaconquista) and Liga de Jovens Baianos on their social media. Connect to support their work on digital violence in schools, open data in aerospace, and much more.
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