Decolonization and Inclusion

  What is it? Our curriculum is built to provide the necessary topics that we deem is important to teach to the youth of our society. However, decolonising  the curriculum is an issue that has been prominent in the education sector over some years.  Over the years this realisation that the curriculum teaches from Eurocentric and postcolonial outlook has highlighted areas where we must make a change. One concern has been mentioned in this Guardian article as it refers to a lack of representation in students' reading list. This has led to creation of a narrow outlook within the curriculum wherein white hetero male authors implicitly favoured over minority ethnic writers. In result of this, it has introduced a systematic divide to the material available and puts the excellent work of BAME authors into the shadows. Evidently, BAME students must be able to see themselves reflected in the curriculum in order to see themselves as creators of knowledge. This ...

In human history, there is no doubt that the internet is one of our greatest achievements. The ability to access a range of information at the touch of our fingertips, to connect instantly to people all over the world in less than a second. It is so intrinsic to our lifestyles in the modern world that the United Nations have declared access to the internet as a human right. In accordance with this, we have seen technology deployed all over the world both in developed and developing countries. However, the conversation of how the internet could affect a previously disconnected society is rarely discussed - many people often assume that the world is connected already. However, as of 2020 Q4 only 63.2% of the world's population has confirmed access to the internet. There is also a gender gap regarding internet access - women in Africa are 50% less likely to have internet access compared to men. In Indonesia, men are only slightly more likely to have internet access than women, but a...

  The national curriculum often focuses on how technology is a benefit to our lives as a society - we create new programs and machines to solve problems that we have identified. It also covers the dangers that technology has on our personal lives, such as staying safe with the seemingly never-ending development of social media. However, the curriculum avoids going into detail about the negative aspects that constant development of technology has on the physical world, especially in areas such as Africa. The largest problem that affects the developing world would be that of e-waste (electronic waste). E-waste can be defined as "electrical or electronic equipment that has been discarded," according to  this website  dedicated to information about e-waste.  Introducing the Issue There are many reasons that e-waste represents a large issue with technology, including human-related and environmental damage. With the disappointing issue of "planned obsolescence" now becomi...

  Background Despite being a relatively modern subject, Computer Science is a lot closer to the time of decolonisation than we first believe. The fall of many colonies around the world coincided with the rise of computer science in the mid 1900s.  Independence seems like a binary state but unlike computing the real world lives on a spectrum. Natural languages take time to evolve rather updating the compiler to a new point release. Keywords are major offenders, who linger in our dialects through propagation by educators and repetition in industry. This post looks at the use of some of these problematic terms in the computing curriculum, in particular the use of “Master” and “Slave” in distributed computing. To reduce the use of these terms we need to cut the chain of transmission by propagating different terms in their place. Class Activity - Starter on Decolonising Distributed Computing This activity aims to use the students literacy skills to categorise words that have been s...