Connecting the Unconnected

Connecting the Unconnected in the field of Education Excellence, Cyber Security & Rural Solutions and Women Empowerment in ICT The impact of digital technologies on blended and online education If spell and grammar checkers have already created new dialects/languages, e.g. MS-English, “AI platforms” is now generating one or, may be, multiple “creativities” accordingly with data that fed the system. Of course, the quality and the range of knowledge expressed by the system is directly related to the quality and the richness of the dataset to feed it. One of the potential scenarios, soon, is to face the geometric proliferation of document due to this “ghost author”. How can we identify a human “product” from a machine product? Is AI to be considered as a co-author? These requests many times create potential conflicts on the side of IPR, do we need to include the BOT as an author , as it is? Lawyers are already animating the debate together with other stakeholders. “Local content” will be soon generated by “local” bots? Integration of skills, technology, and education Islands ok surface knowledge, many times students know how practically but they don’t know why or potential drawbacks. Releasing sensitive data, culture of cybersecurity As it happened in several fields now the access threshold is lowered, much more people can perform similarly and, in short term the gap between the one that know-how and “the one that don’t know what is shared” will be relevant so the risk to do not debunk fakes will increase. The evolving landscape of education – physical vs. virtual We are wrapped in our personal cyber-sphere in a kind of symbiotic relation. Some of the modification of habits imposed by the pandemic become a new “normal” and survived after the end of the crisis. Citizens spend less time outside home, they have shopping online, they buy food and drinks directly delivered on their table, “meet” friends on Zoom or WhatsApp. Citizens experience the world thanks to a cyber device mediated approach; the “new reality” is the one delivered by devices. Direct human relation is quickly diminishing abandon their traditional cultural model and modifying their language in a cyber suitable dialect based on global tokens, acronyms, emoticons, funny clips, and “less”. Cyber-loneliness, one of the foreseeable risks is a kind of addiction to this “parallel life” training users to shift from real to meta-life blurring the border between them immersed in a “global” uniform cultural and linguistic-neutral environment. Insights into digital teaching methodologies, content development, and student engagement The incredibly rapid success of the Internet gave a boost to the globalization trend, the global network distributes all-over the world “homogenised” content, a shift toward uniformity, jeopardizing diversities, broadcasting the vision of “cyber majors” that represent a kind of “oligarchy” concentrated in few countries. In the educational environment the pandemic impacted pupils and young people from kindergarten to university including hospitalised and disabled guys. Digital technology thanks to online lectures, video conferences and educational resources ensured the opportunity to mitigate the problem and experience new methodologies and tools in this field. The educational sector faced some problems far before the pandemic due to the existent gap between traditional courses and new generations interests and abilities. People that grown up playing video games, browsing the Internet, chatting and looking for help online in communities, they use technology seamlessly. A new model for communication processes is required. Mainstream information and Internet resources like Wikipedia and Google are training youth around the world providing the same cultural model, a pensée unique approach, lack of critical thinking, risk to lose cultural identity. Even if there is a reasonable distribution of main languages online this is not doubled in terms of content services related to local culture. The rapid diffusion of AI platforms and LLM was very appreciated by youth that found in these technologies a school companion always eager to support them in case of homework, research, and thesis, what about the impact of these behaviours on future citizens? On the graphical side AI generated images integrated the documents or created deep fake. Emerging technologies and innovations in the education sector No doubt that AI can benefit society performing an incredible number of duties including duties almost impossible to be performed by other means like big data analytics aimed to identify potential patterns, as it happens in health sector and biology, or decoding of ancient inscriptions in unknown languages, the list of potential or foreseeable benefits is endless. Concerns on AI start to focus if we consider potential bias (e.g. gender, culture, etc.), automated non supervised decisions, autonomous vehicles behaviours (land, air, water). In case of crisis or malfunction the identification of related responsibilities can be problematic. Potential impacts on society due to general artificial intelligence, or ethical data sourcing use, analytics and reuse, this to do not mention malicious use of AI to exploit resources, leverage on deep fakes and nudging, influence opinion dynamics and perform high-end social engineering. An additional aspect to be carefully considered is the quality and origin of data used to feed and train the system; these data will directly influence the outcome. Here it comes the role of supervised or not supervised systems and the opportunity to intervene as humans in the automatised decision making process. Automated decision systems based on AI are many times part of a network of sensors and actuators, the design of such solutions must carefully consider malfunctions of one or more devices and behave properly (e.g. alerting humans and activating risk mitigating procedures).