Reimagining educational technology (EdTech) through Ubuntu

Abstract

It is argued that over the past few years, higher education institutions in South Africa have been challenged to reimagine themselves in response to societal pressures. Some of these pressures include student protests in response to the hike in student tuition fees and the calls for the decolonisation of university curricula. Although higher education institutions are continually looking at how they can address these societal concerns, the need to reimagine themselves has been fast-tracked due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Traditional face-to-face universities relying primarily on lecturing as the modality for instruction had to rapidly shift their modality to that of online instruction. Consequently, they were able to see the completion of the academic programme. Educational technology played an important role beyond the different modalities and how it afforded and equipped students with skills to engage in society. This was evident with one of the world’s largest social networking sites, YouTube, which changed its user interface by removing its dislike button. The rationale behind this change was to foster ‘respectful interactions between viewers and creators’. Unfortunately, YouTube has been rife with harassment and misinformation over the past year. Higher education institutions have an essential role to play in developing students that can engage in not only virtual learning spaces at their institutions but similarly within these online platforms in a space characterised by openness, reflexivity, responsibility, dissonance and the recognition that humans have the potential to connect, irrespective of disagreements. In this chapter, it is argued that educational technology, amongst other descriptions in the literature, as a pedagogical practice may be augmented through an African philosophy aimed at cultivating learning spaces, such as those created through digital technologies.