Only Connect - Indigenous Digital Learning

Abstract

There is now a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to work across the various digital technology development communities, for example ICT4D and m4d, albeit with their conservative conceptions of learning, and the innovative digital learning communities breaking away from institutional e-learning formats, for example the open learning movement, at a time when many indigenous communities in the global South have considerable experience, access, ownership and familiarity with personal and social digital systems and when the decolonising movement provide the impetus and processes to develop new tools and techniques to work together for an accurate and authentic understanding of learning needs and the methods to address them. This is timely and urgent since digital technologies, produced by Anglophone global corporations and promoting the global knowledge economy, threaten fragile cultures and languages and promote the Fourth Industrial Revolution whilst in fact delivering the next wave of epistemicides. This paper sets the case for urgent, collective and coherent action.