The recent lecture "Digital Paradoxes: How Technology Unintentionally Transforms Education" by Hany Zayed took place on Wednesday, April 17th at 2 PM in the College of Education Room ED 22 and on Zoom.

Description: In 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform project involving the digital transformation of its public education system. Located within a state-led project to build a New Digital Republic and a New Digital Citizen and accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic, this educational digitalization promised to transform Egyptian education and solve its entrenched problems. In Digital Paradoxes, I inquire into the realities of technologies in education. Using the case of Egypt and building on two years of digital ethnographic fieldwork, I show how digital technologies produce paradoxes in education, contradictions between digital promises and educational realities, on the levels of educational institutions, learning and assessment processes, social inequalities, and resistance practices. With those contradictions, I argue that while technology indeed transforms education, it transforms it in unintended and conflicting ways.

Bio: Hany Zayed received his PhD in Sociology from UIUC in 2023 and is the current visiting scholar at the Center for Global Studies.