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Global Teaching Machines and the Remaking of Public Memory: Contest and Digital Human(itie)s in Latin America

Sun, May 29, 9:45 to 11:15am, TBA

Abstract

Networked teaching machines and digital education initiatives are, without doubt, in an age of global expansion. The rapid growth of commercial educational technology (EdTech) solutions in regional policies showcases one key political arena where the design influence of elite global engineers and digital entrepreneurs has notably expanded. Across Latin America, new digital product solutions have fundamentally transformed the design and deployment of national education policies, with a range of nations – 17 documented in the region - launching large scale digital education programs in recent years that claim to enhance digital “inclusion” and productivity by drawing “peripheral” learning sectors into global circuits of exchange. This paper attends to strategies around digital media and history that have accelerated the global growth of EdTech; as well as to experiments in global innovation spaces from the periphery that distinctly engage local memory and press for an engagement with digital humanities practices. By fostering diverse, interdisciplinary collaborations between programmers, transnational media producers and indigenous communities across a range of rural and urban sites, such collaborations challenge the universalist underpinnings that anchor the growth of Edtech, while opening possibilities for distinct genealogies of digital culture and global connection outside the given centers of techno-culture.

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