Middle East: revolutions without revolutionaries

For those tiresome oldsters who see social media as nothing more than the decadence of youth or a meaningless pastime, recent events in the Middle East should have been a slap round the head. A rack of nations, led by a new post-TV generation who partake in genuine dialogue with each other, really have changed the world, irrevocably.

But what do we mean by a media revolution? It was not, I believe, a revolution caused by social media but a revolution that took place in the age of social media. To put it another way, social media was a necessary condition for the revolution but not sufficient. This is, therefore, not a new media revolution, but it is a revolution without revolutionaries, just the sheer force of mass participation, first in new media, then on the streets. It is, of course, more complex than this, so how did the different social media build into a tsunami of discontent and action?

Stage 1: Blogs (despots despised)

Social media gave young people in the Middle East access to the downside of dictatorships– the nepotism, cronyism and corruption of specific ruling families. These revolutions were first fuelled by bloggers who exposed the excesses of the autocrats, along with their wives, sons and relatives. In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s wife and even her nephews were targeted by bloggers and became figures of hate. The Mubarak’s, Gadaffis, Khalifas, House of Saud and others have been exposed in a similar manner. Even the King of Jordan’s wife Rania is under pressure due to her political interference. It is the dynastic nature of these families that are so resented, with father setting up son for power and significant portions of their nations’ wealth being given to friends and relatives. There is nowhere to hide as wikileaks, foreign publications and outside revolutions leak into their countries.

I also don’t believe that this was a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Social media in this type of politics has a certain causality. First the bloggers, who are real activists, with real voices, reporting excesses and explaining in some depth over a long period, the underbelly of the society in which they work and live. They are often the first to be harassed, detained even imprisoned. They act as the unofficial press as the official press are under state control or operate under fear. At this stage Facebook links back to blogs, spreading the word about who’s hot, what’s hot and channels traffic back to bloggers and blog posts.

Stage 2: Facebook (groups emerge)

It’s only much later, when enough heat has been generated, that Facebook is used as an organisational device. It’s a medium in which protest Facebook ‘groups’ grow around causes, martyrs and events. The role of a martyr kicks in, where the images and reports of a suicide (Mohammed Bouazizi) become triggers for groups. At this point the date of a demonstration, for example, is amplified by Facebook, but another medium takes over.

Stage 3 Twitter (street mob)

Dates for demonstrations become twitter triggers, as in the#Jan25 hashtag for the Egyptian demos. Then, as real events on the street unfold, Twitter kicks in with its real-time feed of events; the violence, deaths, more dates for demonstrations. This is when others outside of the country watch, learn and contribute through internationally known hashtags.

So it’s a cascade effect; blogs are individuals, Facebook groups and Twitter the mob.

Stage 4: Denial and shurtdown (Old minds & media)

The ‘media-gap’ between the rulers and the young they rule is immense. The telephone was a novelty when these despots were young and you can’t imagine that they’ve ever used email, never mind social media. In media terms they are archers in the age of gunpowder. Before television Radio in the Middle East was widely used both to unite and disparage others across the Arab world. But it was within an older oral tradition. Halim Barakat describes this expressive style as rhetorical, aggressive and mocking. We saw this on the TV speeches delivered by Mubarak, Suleiman and Ghadaffi . They were patronising and part of an old media model of broadcasting in an ‘adult to child’ fashion. But the world has moved on and this language seemed patronising and out of touch. Young people saw right through it all, as they have grown up with a different, straight speaking model, that is more dialogue than monologue.

The pro-Mubaraks used state television, physically guarding it night and day to put their case. When they saw that they were failing they moved from defence to attack, arresting journalists and closing down Al Jazeera and Nilesat for a full 11 days. (There is no love lost between Mubarak and Qatar.) This attack closed down the internet and mobile networks but the web is like water, it just flows round these obstacles, with alternative routes from tech savvy youngsters defying the ban. Twitter activists even invented speech to text technology for Tweets to get round the Twitter ban. In the end Al Jazeera had to use the web to stream live images. This was as much a media battle as a street revolution.

Stage 4: Action (Youtube)

This is when media start to take a back seat and real people take real action to effect change. It has a different dynamic in different countries. Tunisia and Egypt fell quickly with relatively little bloodshed. Libya is already a civil war and a bloodbath. Bahrain is taking longer. Iran literally living on the edge of revolt. Saudi oppressing everyone as usual, but being forced to make reforms, for the moment in terms of bribes. Jordan has already made changes. They are ALL under pressure to change.

At this point YouTube and the distribution of video, and photographs through the whole media landscape come into their own. Even TV depends, at this stage, on activist journalism, to show what’s happening on the ground, as the state can simply control TV channels. However, at this stage, new media is no longer the prime mover, it is in reporting mode.

Libya - Wikipedia revolution

It’s been fashionable for some, like Malcolm Gladwell, Chomsky, and George Siemens to dismiss the role of social media in the Arab Spring. Well, I place the testimony of those young Arabs over these scoffing, North American writers and academics, who are somewhat distanced from these events. I’ve written about the role of social media in the Arab Spring before but only recently spoken to Libyans who explained how it was somewhat different there.

Blogs

Al Jazeera had already played a significant role in Tunisia and Egypt, and it was the Al Jazeera Live blog that fuelled initial interest in the early events in Libya. Although this was often 8-10 hours out of date, it was something. The whole revolution had kicked of quite suddenly, so everyone, the media included were taken by surprise. Eventually other sites became the main source of live news, in particular people turned to the Libyan Youth Movement and Libya Feb 17^th sites for blogs that were both credible and up to date. These sites aggregated news from lots of different media and social media sites.

Twitter bypasses Facebook

In this case, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Facebook was bypassed by Twitter. There were immediate uprisings in a number of locations as it turned into an armed conflict, so less need for specific groups around a cause or demonstration. What the country needed was lots of immediate and specific information from the front line. Before long they were literally asking people of they knew how to drive captured tanks. Twitter links to video were a detailed source of events as they unfolded on several fronts. Eventually, as Gaddaffi troops were captured or killed, they found that their phones showed atrocities, which in turn were shown through Twitter links and Youtube. Interestingly Gaddafi’s name proved useless as a tag as it has so many different spellings. Twitter was even used as a source of information and co-ordinates for NATO, direct from the frontline, leading to more accurate bombing.

Wikipedia – what a surprise

Now here was the real surprise, good old Wikipedia became a focal point as a map showing towns and villages updated from green (Gaddaffi) to grey (contact), blue (fighting), zigzag (urban fighting) brown (taken). In addition, the countries that supported the new regime were coloured in on a world map, as they came on board. Who would have thought – Wikipedia contributing to a revolution.

TV

Sky and Al Jazeera were the real heroes as they got to the frontline and stayed there with some hardcore reporting, even shoving microphones into Gaddaffi’s face. The BBC started well as they moved along the north coast from Benghazi, but they soon faded making the wrong calls on location (going south) and getting holed up in Tripoli. CNN was just hopeless.

Media and mediums are the message

Lastly, there’s no social media without a ‘medium’ and in all this talk about Facebook and Twitter, the simple fact that the internet, computers, laptops and especially mobiles, are the real lifeblood of the revolution. The growth of mobiles on the back of cheap tariffs has been phenomenal in these markets. The mobile phone is powerful, portable and personal. It records images and video and can be used to report from the scene itself. Remember that twitter during the Egyptian uprising could only operate once voice to text was available.

The process described above does not apply when social media is shut down, as in Libya. In this case YouTube and mobile recorded video leaked to TV plays a bigger role. We have seen this in Libya and Syria with the astonishing scenes of people being gunned down in Deraa and Sanamayn, where the shooting is seen and heard, then the dead clearly and deliberately shown to mobile cameras. This resulted in even more protests in Homs, Tafa, and astonishingly, as it is near the birthplace of Assad, Latakia. Interestingly, free access to social media has become a negotiating point with Assad in Syria, as it has become one of the key demands of the protesters.

Role of Arabic

Another important feature of the Arab world is it's common language - Arabic. Information needs no translation across the region. News spreads fast, very fast indeed. These countries also have large numbers of nationals from other Arab countries living and working within their borders. In the Gulf states this is acute, with some countries having more foreign nationals than locals. This leads to greater cross-pollination.

Conclusion

I’ve travelled a fair bit in the Middle East over the last ten years, especially in the last year, and what I’ve always loved about the region is the people. Now that those people have been given a voice, through social media, we need to listen, understand and give them all the support they need.

Viral selfie sparks debate about culture of academe

This selfie and story have gone viral in Malaysia. It’s the perfect image of the gulf between the old and the young, or more accurately the old and the new – the grumpy, old academic, bamboozled by what’s happening and the excited young student, ready to celebrate his achievement. 21-year-old photography student, Muhammed Radzi, took the selfie at his graduation but has been suspended by the University for being disrespectful. The lad was confused, "I thought what was the harm in recording this moment after working hard for two years in getting my diploma… 

I really did not know that it was not allowed, and no one told me." He in no way meant it to be disrespectful. In fact he thought, as a photography student, that it was appropriate, a sort of celebration of his achievement. "I thought it would be appropriate for a photography student like me to make a symbolic gesture in taking a selfie”. Interesting

Clash of age and culture

For the elderly academic, photography is all about posed images for weddings, official functions, officials, group graduation pictures and brochures. He has no idea that photography has now largely migrated to the capture of real life events and online delivery. But there’s something deeper at work here. Malaysia has a mixture of Confucian and Islamic cultures, both of which have deeply-embedded principles of deference, for age and authority. Confucius and Mohammed both had an enormous and still massively influential influence on education. There’s bigger issues at stake here.

Internet – child of Enlightenment

The internet was born in the west, in an open, post-Enlightenment culture, where freedom of speech and critical thought are admired and seen as fundamental to academe. Don’t assume that this is true elsewhere. Similarly in education. Many countries have adopted the robes, mortar boards, degrees and structures of the European University; they have not adopted its principles.

1. Not a liberal-arts agenda

Many countries in the Far East, Middle East and Africa, have NOT adopted the liberal-arts agenda and why should they? They are happy to adopt the trappings of academia but not what they see as the principles of free thought, open debate and critical thinking. Their main purpose is personal and societal economic progress; not personal intellectual development. We assume that our enlightenment values should be adopted globally. This has not happened.

2. Knowledge transmission

Knowledge is seen in many institutions as a commodity to be passed down from academics to students. In Confucian cultures, despite the fact that there’s a great deal of pedagogic sophistication in Confucian texts, the master-pupil transmission, or what Freire called the ‘banking’ model of teaching and learning is still the norm. The model in the Middle East is often a literal process of rote learning, memorisation and recitation, that mirrors that of religious learning (Koran literally means recitation.) This is changing but slowly.

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Confucius

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Mohammed

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Freire

3. Critical thought is not the point

Few who teach, either there or here in the west, dispute the fact that it is difficult to get many students engaged in asking questions, critical debate and a culture of free expression. I myself have experienced this in work I did for the World Bank online into China and lecturing to students in Malaysia, where the only questions came from foreign, Western students. Their mindset is different and they’re there to get the job done. I’m not saying this is bad but it is different.

4. Culture of deference for age

This is a noted principle, not only in Confucian and Islamic cultures but in many other cultural contexts. We are far less submissive in the west and see the young as not only having a voice but our duty being to encourage them to develop that voice. The rise of teenage culture in the West was not mimicked in every other corner of the globe.

5. Culture of deference for authority

Deference for political, religious and institutional authority is still a potent force in many countries. We may see our University years as being one of free thought, reflection, even rebelliousness. That is not always tolerated elsewhere. In fact, students may be seen as submitting to the regime of the institution, be diligent, study hard and question little.

6. Business of education

Witness the fact that few students from the east come to the UK to do courses beyond the utilitarian; business, IT, engineering and medicine etc. This is about status back home and making money, not critical thought. Of course, the Universities in the west are glad to keep this hidden under the mortar-board, as they need this revenue for survival. Many are now dependent on this income stream. When it comes to the crunch this side of Higher Education is in the ‘business’ of education. It’s a shady world of marketing, agents and less than rigorous admissions.

Them and Us?

Far from being a ‘them’ and ‘Us’ issue, it has become an exchange. Students today are much more global in outlook. Many have taken the trappings of our system but not the culture or entire curriculum. We are increasingly copying their more ractical, utilitarian view of Higher Education. Funding has been increasing in STEM subjects at the expense of the Liberal-Arts agenda, driven by a political perception that we’re in catch-up mode with eastern economies (and PIDA). Far from copying Finland, we’re more likely to be following Shanghai. This may be seen as heresy but why should they copy a system that is going through crises in costs and relevance?

Conclusion

Both systems are imbalanced and both have a lot to learn from each other. There is an assumption in Academia, of a homogenous worldwide network of Universities, that have all adopted the liberal views of western academe. This was never true in most parts of the world, outside of Europe and the US. They’re milking us for our structures, processes and expertise but have no intention of necessarily copying our values. Nevertheless, what the selfie story shows is that this Culture War still has a long way to go. The next generation use, communicate, contribute, collaborate and live a good deal of their lives in that other vast global territory – the internet. They may well have their say. On the other hand that ‘say’ may be the rejection of the Enlightenment model. The digital genie is out of the bottle but the jury is also still out……

Hizbollah, games and mobiles

Just back from the Middle East. Spoke to loads of people en route (actually loads of men and just one woman) in cafes and internet cafes. The take up of new technology is astonishing - here's a few examples:

Hizbollah Computer Game
We were in Jordan during the Israel-Lebanon war and it was interesting to see how the arab world sees this conflict. In effect, they see a different war. The news footage is full of Hizbollah, as well as Israeli, attacks. I seem to remember only seeing Israeli shot satellite images. Hizbollah means Party of God and have distanced themselves from Al Qaida. Indeed they despise Osama Bin Laden. Nasrallah is much more moderate than we in the west are led to believe. He denounced the 9/11 attacks as well as attacks on tourists in Egypt.

This is a sophisticated organisation who have even produced their own computer game - Special Force. This is based on Hizbollah's 20 year battle with Israel and is produced in Arabic, French and Farsi. They did this to counter the effects of US inspired military games that show the arab world as cannon fodder for US forces.

Special Force simulates operations on Israeli soldiers. You are a Hizbollah fighter and have to cope with the weather, mines and different numbers of Israeli troops. You can practise your sniping skills on Israeli political and military figures including the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The game resists the Israeli occupation through the mediaand sold thousands of copies in Lebanon in the first two weeks after its release and has gone on to sell at least 10,000 more since in other countries.

Internet Cafes
These were everywhere, even in the smallest of towns, and were very busy. Walking around observing I saw lots of guys playing games but also lots of veiled women on online dating or social websites. I can't read arabic, but the lurid graphics - large red hearts etc - were a sure sign. It would seem that the internet is one way to escape the strict rules about social appearance and contact.

Camel driver and blackberry
In the Wadi Rum, a wonderful and huge desert reserve (famously featured in the film Lawrence of Arabia) I witnessed a camel driver with a Blackberry.

Bedouin and satellite TV
The bedioun are a wonderful sight in their low slung goat-hair tents (expand in summer to create holes for airflow, contract in winter to keep in heat) and always a herd of goats, sheep and sometimes camels. I saw one with a satellite dish!. The guide explained that they run this from their truck battery and watch TV in the tent. He also explained that nomadic people often have mobiles as it is especially useful for keeping in touch with their other nomadic relatives and getting news on merkets etc.

Mobiles
everyone seemed to have a mobile. There's an interesting description in the book Muhajabebabes by Allegra Stratton (highly recommended) describing how gay men in Kuwait use mobiles and bluetooth to 'gezz' (crude) and make contact in their black tinted jeeps. Homosexuality is illegal in the Middle East although, as one can imagine, not uncommon. I had a copy of the Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom with me. It gives some idea of how common this was among both the Turkish and Arab troops.

More worrying was the political use of mobiles. the networks are often owned by relatives of the ruling powers. For example, Syriatel is owned by Assad's cousin and has been used to send everyone text messages inviting them to attend pro-Assad political rallies.

Education’s a slow learner (lessons from WISE 2011)

1200 leaders in learning from 120 countries at WISE2011, all flown into Doha by the Qatar Foundation to shape the future, with a focus on innovation. Did they succeed? Yes and no. It takes more than three days to create an Education Spring. Here’s my take.

Education’s a slow learner

It may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and horizontal sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption.

Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.

It took a politician, Gordon Brown, to show we educators how to communicate, teach, frame a problem THEN a solution. His speech was masterful, laying out the many dimensions of the problem, informing through humour, moving the audience with heart rending stories then he hit us with a vision, a clear goal and details on funding. All children in school by 2015, with massive injection of funds by the private sector, public sector, religious institutions and not-for-profits. He put great emphasis on tech companies such as Google, Apple and so on, which was novel.

Generation gap

Few were using Twitter, Facebook was a mystery to most and fewer still blog. The stage was often filled by older people in dull suits who all agreed with each other, that education was a glorious and great good. If only our leaders could see this, give us more money, then all our sins would be washed away. But this doesn’t wash. Things only sprang into life when we got younger learners' voices, like the young Qatari woman who shocked the academics by saying she wouldn’t have got through her medical degree without Wikipedia. She challenged the audience to step into their local school to see if things have got better (obviously meaning they had not).

Real innovators, like Jimmy Wales, were thin on the ground. I would have given him the WISE prize, as Wikipedia is a truly amazing, global, scalable success in learning. He explained that he didn’t have a business plan and just got on with the task, “I’m a carpenter not an architect”.  A recurring theme of the conference was the undercurrent of ludditism. Even the presenters were at it, with little digs at technology. We kept hearing ‘technology is only a tool’, ‘technology is not proven’, ‘it’s not the technology its teachers that matter’. Replace the word ‘technology’ with ‘books’ and you’ll see how odd this is. Valerie Hannon of the Innovation Unit has continued with this anti-technology theme in her blog.

Crisis of relevance

The Arab Spring has taught us educationalists a lesson. The heavy investment in education, especially universities, is turning out graduates with low, relevant skills, resulting in mass unemployment. Across the Arab world of 85m 18-24 year olds, nearly 1 in 5 is unemployed. The immediate (and it is immediate) challenge is to develop skills for employment and security. 1 in 4 are out of work in Tunisia. In Egypt 34% of young people wait for a long time before finding a job. They call it the ‘waithood’ and can be up to 3 years or more. At 7% of GDP on education, Tunisia is near the top of the league table, so what went wrong? Why has so much money been spent with so little success? Ask the graduates. “No one wants the skills we have and we don’t have the skills they want”. E4E (Education for employment) has a real and relevant approach where employability matters with application based learning and good career guidance. Employers want real world experience not just paper qualifications, so you have link education to the workplace. With female job seekers it’s worse , with unemployment at more than 30-35% among female graduates.

There was some agreement on the lack of relevant skills, most employers expressing dissatisfaction with critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communications. The system was stuck with memorisation and lecture based learning. Professors sell their notes and set exams around the memorisation of these notes to increase sales. Asking questions and questioning the knowledge of teachers and academics is barely tolerated. This is not education, this is programming. On top of this there’s a strong stigma against vocational training, especially among educationalists.

Edgar Morin saw modern universities as having failed to respond to modern times. Their disciplines limit our knowledge and lead to separation. We need relevant knowledge, not barren , specialised experts, lost outside of their discipline. The proof? The current financial crisis shows this – academics are impotent and lost. They have lost the ability to communicate properly and come up with solutions.

Educational colonialism

A German Professor of Mathematics told me that he’s just spent 6 months in Ethiopia help set up 40 (not a mistype) Universities. He thought this was lunacy. The country has barely functioning schools and they’ve been fed the line that HE is the answer to their problems. What they need, he explained was more vocational colleges for technicians and functional jobs, not advanced degrees. This is the madness of institutionalised initiatives.

All over the Middle East and Africa, western Universities are playing this game, setting up campuses in education parks. It’s a distortion that they could do without. It sets the expectation that everyone should become a ‘Doctor or Engineer’. That’s the phrase you hear all the time. No, these countries need functioning managers and professionals across a wide range of professions.  On the same panel, a South African claimed that the country needed ’more postdocs and women in Engineering’ (that old trope). Oh yeah?

I attended a completely sterile debate on University rankings. Despite general agreement that a linear sequence does not statistically represent the diversity of the institutions or data, and despite knowing that they don’t represent teaching (yet are used by parents and teachers to choose universities), they are still used by academics who should know better. These are lies told by people who know they are lying. Prof Jeffrey Sachs was clear, don't invest in the American model, now driven by greed selfishness and short-sightedness.

Revolution’s here

The Arab Spring was omnipresent. It coloured everything. Young people want jobs and in the Middle East the current model hasn’t worked. Degrees have been commoditised. What people need is jobs. We need to recognise that technology played a huge role in the Arab Spring, and if it can help topple governments, it can help transform education. The Arab world has one language and could benefit hugely from an initiative that produced good Arabic content, from the cloud, that was device-independent. If the Qatar Foundation could step up to the plate on this one, we’d have real progress.

Some voiced the opinion that the Arab Spring is the best thing that could have happened for education in the Arab world. It could help elevate the agenda to where it ought to be. Why? Long standing institutions, with sclerotic structures and management, are the problem, with deeply rooted incentives to prepare for a test or get a diploma. So, at the heart of any programme needs to be the reform of incentives, comprehensive and ambitious reform, not only in countries that have gone through revolutionary change but other countries by proximity.

A deeply depressing incident occurred in Charlie Leadbeater’s session on innovation. After a brilliant triplet of innovators who were reshaping education by getting it out of the traditional classroom, the Minister of Education for Iran swanned in with a posse of henchmen. Or so we though. It was actually a lackey who read a speech that had numbered goals around setting tens of thousands of Koranic schools and prayer rooms, linking, and I quote ‘knowledge to religion’. This cultural engineering is a disgrace. More education, in this, sense is casting the net backwards.

Out of the box

You must not only think out of the box but get out of the box that is the classroom. Indeed, the best workshop was on three innovations from India, Denmark and Australia. All three had taken education out of the classroom. A school in Denmark, Hellerup Skole, had been built as a ‘house’ then space allocated and appropriate furniture bought. In Australia Stephen Harris had abolished classrooms and reimagined education around different concepts of space. I asked him why his kids were still in uniforms and he said, clearly annoyed, “it’s the legacy of the British public school system”.

I heard of schools under mango trees, walking schools that took place in a different house in the village each day, learning in church halls after hurricanes that had wrecked everything else, pavement kids in India that had school bussed to them as they couldn’t leave their home unguarded. Did you know that 50% of all schooling in Afghanistan takes place in tents?

Of course, the real space that has been colonised by learning is virtual. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Khan Academy, VLEs, OER and a huge number of other sites and tools have created an alternative world of learning. Despite WISE attendees being largely lost with technology, technology is easily the most important innovatory force in learning.

Get real

Lifelong learning appears to have been hijacked, at least in Europe, by educational institutions. I attended a workshop on LL that started with nothing but talk of Universities and the funding they receive in Lifelong Learning. Until, that is, the audience revolted and pointed out that institutions are the reason why Lifelong Learning is failing. We know that formal and informal must be recognised. This is not about schooling, but avoiding the trap that schooling leads to – that learning must take place in institutions through courses, with teachers. One could argue that Universities have little or nothing to do with this.

On the topic of realism, Martin Burt runs schools as businesses. The schools pay for themselves. Rather than teaching abstract maths they teach business maths. For him this is not a business project but a business. This is interesting, an appeal that more learning should be REAL and RELEVANT. Until we see knowledge, skills and learning in context we’ll be stuck in a culture that values the academic over everything else. We know this has been a huge mistake. Vocational learning needs a voice.

Get mobile

Despite the obvious barriers, such as small screens, cost, technical variability in devices and basic illiteracy, it’s starting to happen. Mobiles are powerful, personal and portable. The costs are plummeting, with some operators offering zero rates for educational use. In some countries the cellphone has leapfrogged other technology for the poor.

Dr Maths has been used by 30,000 students in Africa, and elsewhere, to deliver text and tutor support in maths. They bypassed schools and teachers entirely relying on word of mouth. They operate in S Africa and found that even in the townships mobile ownership and access was pretty much universal. In fact it is staggering how much poor people will spend on mobiles – up to 30% of their income.

Of course, seeing mobile as just a communication device between teachers and learners restricts its primary advantage – scalability. Tutors and teachers are not scalable. I learnt how Twitter was used for language learning (the 140 letter constraint is the trick). Siri offers a breakthrough here with voice recognition and AI driven coaches, assistants and language learning.

Education not a universal ‘good’

In the British Library yesterday, I spent a few hours in their superb Taking Liberties exhibition which had a section on the clash between religious belief and freedom of speech. Iwent upstairs to see their collection of early Bibles, Korans and Torahs, one of the best collections of early books in the world. It set me thinking. Books such as Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Mill’s On Liberty and Paine’s The Rights of Man have led to a largely secular view of rights and liberties. I can’t say the same for the Bible, Torah and Koran. 

Education is usually seen as a universal ‘good’. But recent world events suggest that education is not necessarily a ‘good’ in itself, and may in fact, be a horrifically destructive force. An educational battle of titanic proportions is taking place in many parts of the world. It is rarely discussed but continues to have a profound effect on world history. I’m talking about the impact of fundamentalist Islamic, Jewish and Christian teaching and methods on the minds young people in theist schools, using religious texts as the ultimate authority. Education, as practiced in fundamentalist Islamic, Jewish and Christian places of learning are, in my view, damaging, leading to intolerance and political conflict. Interestingly, in all three there is a similar focus on the powerful recitation and repeated readings of a basic book. This, the three Abrahamic religions have in common. We needn’t be surprised at this, since the three religions are entwined with each other through their books. The Torah, five books of Moses, are included in the expanded Old Testament of the Christians and The Koran draws from the Torah, regarding it as the word of Allah given to Moses. The Koran refers to Mohammed as the prophet mentioned in the Torah.

What I’m saying here is that the educational power of recitation, repetition and memorisation is massively effective and therefore massively limiting and destructive in terms of critical thinking and tolerance. Education without critical thinking has immense destructive power.

Islamic education – conviction and recitation 

Koran means ‘recitation’. In Islamic teaching, everything stems from the pages of this one book. It was meant to be read aloud to promote recitation and memorising of the book, through repeated spoken readings, has always been highly prized in the Islamic world. But this comes at a price. This repeated repetition is massively effective in learning and results in the deep processing and retention of the text, and the unshiftable, dogmatic convictions that come with deeply held knowledge and belief. In short, it is an educational recipe for dogmatic fanaticism.

It is impressive and common to witness the devotional prayers in Muslim countries, from mass attendances in Mosques to single musilms praying on any available spot. It’s a five times a day ritual, but worrying to think that this lifelong example of spaced practice, may squeeze out learning that is incompatible with the precepts of the Koran. It is an example of successful learning that, in itself can prevent further learning. Wherever I go in the Islamic world I see the rise of religious and regressive educational systems. Education is gradually becoming politicised by active religious believers, and inept and ineffective governments. The educated elite continue to educate their children abroad, while populations turn to religious schools that encourage conformity, not critical analysis.

The teaching in fundamentalist Islamic schools teaches that God passed his thoughts through the archangel Gabriel directly to the illiterate Mohammed over a period of years, as the final prophet to mankind, the final expression of God’s will. It is a text ridden with the primitive beliefs of its age and, at times, downright primitive in its prescriptions against women and non-believers.

Philip Hitti’s classic the History of the Arabs has an excellent chapter on the history of Islamic education. Schools were, and are going back to becoming adjuncts of the Mosque with the entire curriculum being base on the Koran. Memory work is particularly emphasised. Even today there are high rewards for children who manage to memorise the Koran. Interestingly, the teacher was not highly regarded in Islamic history, often a low status figure, even figure of fun. More recently we have seen the massive increase in the number of schools that are primarily religious. Organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas are often the only organisations to provide adequate education for the poor, as the governments are often too corrupt and uncaring to do it properly.

Jewish education – chosen conviction 

Torah means ‘teaching’, ‘instruction’ or ‘doctrine’. Its 613 commandments, split into 365 negative and 248 positive moral imperatives. Again, like the Koran, it is believed to have been written by divine revelation, this time by Moses. Reading the Torah aloud is central to Jewish ritual. As with Islam and the Koran, the repeated and cyclical recitation leads to deeply processed knowledge and beliefs. Orthodox believers take every word literally, something they have in common with Islamic fundamentalist believers. There is a deep split in Israel between orthodox and other schools and a battle currently raging to defend religious Torah-based schools. Half of all students in Jerusalem attend ultra-Orthodox ‘heredi’ schools. 70% of ultra-Orthodox men don’t work as it interferes with their religious studies. This is a group that, like their Islamic and fundamentalist Christian believers abhor homosexuality and have been known to attack women who they deem to be improperly dressed. Unlike most secular countries, this religious power reaches right up into government, especially in the settler communities. The majority of the illegal settler communities are ultra-Orthodox or Religious Zionists, all driven by the belief that their land rights are given by God, as if he were some sort of racially motivated real estate agent. Land ownership is not a covenant from God.

The problems in the Middle East focus on Israel and peace agreements are almost impossible to complete because of the extremists on both sides. If you’ve ever travelled in Israel you will have experienced the aloofness ultra-orthodox Jews. That’s fine. I have no problem with people doing their own thing, but when it comes to illegal settlements, stealing other people’s land, bulldozing their properties and bombing them into submission with tanks and artillery, on the grounds that ‘God gave them the right’, it is downright obscene. Religious learning results in convictions about land occupation that has resulted in millions spending their entire lives in refugee camps.

Christian education – Christ and conviction 

It may now be possible to become President of the USA if you’re black, brown, yellow or a woman. But if you don’t believe in God, or more particularly, you’re not a Christian – forget it. It will be interesting to observe whether Obama dares to avoid using explicitly Christian language in his inauguration speech.

Fundamentalist Christian education is on the rise and it’s squeezing into our schools through anti-evolution, homophobic, anti stem-cell research, pro-life stances that take us backwards not forwards. We’ve had a Bush presidency that has been arguably the worst in US history, sure of their religious supremacy to the level of waging war on those who don’t. Its disdain for international law, the legitimisation of torture and hostility towards the United Nations, was, in part, driven by fundamentalist religious believers.

American has recently been, in many ways, a theocracy. American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips warned in 2006 of Bush’s preacher-ridden, debt-bloated regime, if left unchecked, would become untenable. Boy did he get than one right! At the core of the Bush regime is militant religion, a growing fundamentalist and evangelical movement that has waged a ‘thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam’. Its megachurches, televangelism and the fact that 1 in 4 Americans is affiliated with a conservative Protestant church.

Things are a little different in the more secular Europe, but in the UK, and in Northern Ireland and Scotland, the existence of segregated schools continues to generate antagonistic values that have led to decades of murders and bombings. Then there was the horrors of the Balkans.

NOT Islamophobia, Anti-semitism or Anti-Christian 

This is not an exercise in Islamophobia, anti-semitism or anti-Christian. In fact the most extreme forms of these phenomena come from each of the sets of three fundamentalists attacking each other, not secular groups. I have spend more time travelling in Islamic countries and love the art, architecture, cultures and people. What I don’t admire is the crippling effect of fundamentalist education. At its worst they kill school teachers and deny girls and women the basic right to education, but even at the moderate level it seems to deaden real inquiry and critical thinking. The fundamentalists may win because they understand that education is the key to long-term success. This is the clear strategy of the smarter political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas. They, in turn, are reacting to the hideous beliefs of Jewish settlers who stole their land and confine them to fenced in camps. I have also been to Israel and witnessed the brutality of an occupying force towards people in Gaza and the West bank, people who did little more than resist when the land they had occupied for centuries was stolen. Fundamentalist Judaism is frighteningly racist. My experience in the US is perhaps greater than that of the other two. I studied at a US Ivy League university, worked there and have travelled there more times than I can remember, over a period of thirty years. The televangelism, megachurches and obsessions with homophobia, abortion and creationism, still shock me. US fundamentalists funded and supported Bush in his maniacal support of Israel and firestorms in the Middle East. Let’s hope that Obama keeps his ambiguous religious beliefs out of politics. 

To conclude..... 

Any school or teacher who professes belief in the literal truth ofreligious texts, revealed through divine revelation, is in my view, a danger. I believe in secular education and don’t like religious schools in any guise. I was brought up in a highly divided society in Scotland, where segregated schools are still the norm, much to Scotland’s shame. Watching today's events in Gaza is even more depressing and the US abstaining on the UN resolution, perhaps the last evil last gasp from Bush's cronies a matter of deep shame. Keep education secular.

7 traits of online graduates that trump campus colleagues

For three years, I’ve walked up the ramparts into Edinburgh castle, donned an academic gown, plonked a mortar board on my head, then walked down an aisle behind the skirl of the bagpipes, to present degrees to some remarkable students. It was, again, a beautifully staged event, one they’ll remember all of their lives. So will I.

Unique qualities

My speech this year was on what makes them distinct and special. These students had worked for three years to gain their degrees in Architecture, Graphic Design, Illustration and Photography. They came from many lands: India, the Far East, Middle East and Europe. All had completed their degrees online. Astonishingly, they had never met their tutors until this graduation day. Even more remarkable, year on year, these students consistently outperform their campus-based peers.

Far from being inferior to their corresponding campus-based colleagues, the graduates with these degrees are, I believe, superior. As an employer, and to be honest, as just an objective observer, if they were to turn up at my door, I’d consider them a fantastic, talent pool, eminently hireable. Why? There are traits these graduates have that are confirmed by the fact that they completed a hard-won degree in this way – online.

1. Desire to develop

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled”. You’ve heard that Robert Frost line before but these students really did make that choice. Unlike most 18 year-old undergraduates who simply progress, often in lock-step, from school to ‘Uni’, every last one of these people came a bit later to the game. They had to make a leap and actively choose to pay for a degree for personal development, promotion prospects, career change or quite simply for the love of their subject. They had the desire to lift themselves out of their normal lives, change direction and chose to make this leap. That’s brave and admirable.

2. Overcame obstacles

This is no ordinary group of graduates but a mixture of smart people who have jobs, children and responsibilities. They had to juggle the demands of their work, children, partners, friends, tutors and support staff to get to their goal. This overcoming of personal obstacles makes them ready to deal with work-life issues that a fresh-faced student couldn’t imagine.2. Persevered

Motivation, and its offspring perseverance, is guaranteed, as they have had to consistently pick themselves up and drive forward against all the odds. This trait is interesting, one essential in client work, where you have to work through problems, criticisms and setbacks; all the things that client-supplier work entails. Creative work has no end – nothing is ever perfect, judgements often subjective. These learners have lived through this for three years, under expert tutelage and pushed themselves, time and time again, towards a series of deadlines and the ultimate goal – their degree. At only 8% , the drop-out rate is wondrous.

3. Project managed

Project work, and these fields are almost wholly a series of projects, require good project management skills. In working through virtual studios to submit work, go through many iterations where online tutors provide efficient and effective constructive feedback and quite simply manage their valuable and limited time, is to manage projects and that, by definition, means project management skills.

5. Communicated

Anyone whose work is largely online will know how sensitive one has to be when body language and other cues are absent. Taking a brief online, delivering project work and assessments online, as well as taking constructive feedback, demands communications skills that are badly needed in our world. These are new skills they had to develop over and above the standards competences of their craft. So much of the work they do, and now do at a higher level, will require strong but sensitive online communications skills. They clearly have this in abundance.

6. Self-aware and self-driven

An often ignored, but well researched aspect of good learning is self-awareness or ‘metacognition’, the ability to become aware, knowledgeable and reflect on your own learning. This, in turn, allows you to efficiently manage your own learning. This is what Higher Education aspires to, giving students the ability to become autonomous learners. Having seen the way these online students learn, the support they receive and the results, you can see how these graduates are brilliant, autonomous learners.

7. Digital doers

A digital degree is in some ways more relevant to 21^st century life and work. Work, especially in the jobs where these students excel, is largely digital, even if it does eventually end up as a book cover, poster, product or building. The tools they use are digital, their work is managed digitally and delivery is digital. I’ve seen the work produced by all of these graduates, both 2D and 3D, how else but online – it was well worth the effort.

Competence

Note that I haven’t even mentioned competence. I mean competence in terms of their craft, skills and expertise in their chosen fields. This I take as a given. What matters, for me, is what they had to deal with and develop along the way, all of those extra qualities that education should impart and amplify.

Unique degrees

The degrees are awarded by the University of Hertfordshire and delivered by the Interactive Design Institute. What makes these degrees unique is that have three intakes a year, deliver exemplary digital content, provide high quality constructive feedback from tutors through virtual studios, as well as strong pastoral support. All of this led to these degrees and this method of delivery being the first to be approved by the QAA.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that campus graduates don’t have these skills but I do think that the students I meet here, year after year, have a far higher probability of possessing and having developed these qualities. In my eyes, it makes them the sort of people that are a credit to their partners, families, employers and, most of all, to themselves.