Global health is a planetary phenomenon that can be scary if we think about it in terms of mindless resource consumption, structural inequalities, human experimentation, military biological programs and so on (Crawford, 2021; Sweeney, 2022). Based on numerous definitions (Beaglehole & Bonita, 2010; Koplan et al., 2009), I would define global health as an art and science of solving health issues beyond the national borders. Global health has ties with modern technologies in questions of their impact on people’s health and planet as a whole. Global health is connected with education and economy as it is essential for any society to get a healthy graduate.

Let us look at the interconnectedness of technologies, education, and global health through the lens of a recent massive health crisis. When asked about types of health, people usually remember three sides of a triangle: physical health, mental health, and social health. The pandemic revealed the significance of all three of them. Specifically, COVID-19 period had differential effects on multiple education players, for example, kids from kindergarten to Grade 12 re-evaluated friendship, feeling connected, and participating in extracurricular activities (Bennett, 2020); unsuspecting parents were found worthy to complement math, physics, history and reading learning of their children (Burgess & Sievertsen, 2020; Kuhfeld et al, 2020); everyone realized how important physical and social developments are for the young learners; adult high achievers in colleges and universities barely noticed the educational medium change etc.

I am glad that questions of equality, building character, resilience, and relational skills (Boys, 2021; Primer, 2020), the foundations of mental and social health of learners, are highlighted by the pandemic researchers. However, I cannot agree with some conclusions drawn from the COVID experiences, for example, placing elected politicians in a God’s position (Primer, 2020, p. 5), or thinking that traditional teaching is somehow flawed (Primer, 2020, p. 5), and simplification of education is due.

In reality, modern kids will easily acquire the computational and digital skills because children get digital devices first and foremost as their parents’ attention substitute. With those high-tech toys parents usually buy some of their life back. At the same time, “large quantities of traditional data in the established sciences, literature, history, mathematics, and physics” that the Primer’s (2020) authors criticize on Page 5 for no particular reason will provide an excellent background for “sound analysis and decision-making” that they strive for on Page 6.

In my opinion, we should not allow overly enthusiastic and inexperienced policy makers to use this health crisis for further destabilization of education. Any serious innovations have to be suggested only after the COVID-19 occurrence is thoroughly analyzed, not to imbalance the educational system more with the unreasonable reforms.

In general, as any big social event, the COVID-19 pandemic 2020-2022 had its positive and negative outcomes: in nature, pollution diminished, and flora and fauna flourished; consequently, many reported seeing the Himalayas for the first time in decades since the smog had disappeared. In medicine, lack of medical practitioners surfaced. In education, online delivery and educational technologies grabbed everyone’s attention. In a society overall, occupations that deemed fashionable lost their glamour, and simple and kind people’s attention and relationships became priceless, to mention some changes.

I could not help touching upon one more aspect of today’s world health where the topics of this course naturally merge. According to Koplan et al. (2009), migrant-worker health is also a part of global health (p. 1994), and it is obvious that Ukrainians moving to Canada are bringing a lot of pain with them which they subconsciously redirect toward people around.

It can take different forms: Ukrainian Canadian social workers point out excessive demands from the newcomers; host Canadian families – inactivity; my Ukrainian Canadian friend who recently visited an in-person welcome meeting for Ukrainians – arrogance etc. I reckon all those stress manifestations, from overcompensation through stupor to depression, signal the painful struggles that the new migrants are dealing with in the process of adaptation to a very different society.

I do not think that displaced Ukrainians are ready for a Canadian education as the best way to adjust unless they were students at home, but I am certain that social media can help them ruminate over what they lived through and relieve some inner tension since it is not common in Ukraine to visit a psychotherapist.

As we know, media functions include information, a public forum, an outlet for escapism and creativity, entertainment, a watchdog for government and other institutions, and education (Understanding Media and Culture, 2010). This specific environment where “information is shared and processed by algorithms which shape the kinds of information human actors are exposed to and the kinds of interactions they can have in real time” (Jones, 2020, p. 19) together with an international virtual audience can be quite supportive, helpful and understanding; online posts and commentaries, individual or in groups, will serve as a non-discriminating and soothing diary; and as a result, it will be possible for many Ukrainians to draw some conclusions and make peace with themselves. This mental health improvement of one national group will contribute to general health enhancement for humanity.

To sum up, everything is connected on Earth, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted medicine, education, government, economy, business, industry, technology, and social life worldwide (Canadian Commission for UNESCO, 2020). To move on, we should carefully examine the COVID-19 disaster and its consequences, use what positive we still have, and avoid exacerbating current situation with technology, education, and global health. I would like to underline that global health depends on a lot of factors, and the best we can do to keep it sustainable is to take care of our individual mental, physical, and social state because “we are all one body moving through time and space together” (Waganese, 2013).

References

Beaglehole, R. & Bonita, R. (2010). What is global health? Global Health Action, 3, 5142. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852240/

Bennette, P. W. (2020, July 20). The educational experience has been substandard for students during COVID-19. Policy Options Politique. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/july-2020/the-educational-experience-has-been-substandard-for-students-during-covid-19/

Boys, J. (2021). Exploring inequalities in the social, spatial and material practices of teaching and learning in pandemic times. Postdigital Science and Education, 4, 13-32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00267-z

Burgess, S., & Sievertsen, H. H. (2020, April 1). Schools, skills, and learning: The impact of COVID-19 on education. VoxEU. https://voxeu.org/article/impact-covid-19-education

Canadian Commission for UNESCO (2020, April 20). COVID-19 is creating a world crisis in education. UNESCO. https://en.ccunesco.ca/blog/2020/4/online-educational-resources-covid19

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300252392

Jones, R. H. (2020). The rise of the pragmatic web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction. In C. Tagg & M. Evans (Eds.), Message and Medium (pp. 17-37). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110670837-003

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E., & Lewis, K. (2020, December 3). How is COVID-19 affecting student learning? Brown Center Chalkboard.

Koplan, J. P., Bond, T. C., Merson, M. H., Reddy, K. S., Rodriguez, M. H., Sewankambo, N. K., & Wasserheit, J. N. (2009). Towards a common definition of global health. Lancet, 373, 1993–1995. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60332-9

Primer: The COVIDEA universe at a glance. (2020). Covid Education Alliance (COVIDEA).

Sweeney, S. (2022, June 14). After months of denial, U.S. admits to running Ukraine biolabs. People’s World. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/after-months-of-denial-u-s-admits-to-running-ukraine-biolabs/

Understanding media and culture: An introduction to mass communication. (2010). The University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/

Wagamese, R. (2013, June 11). Wagamese: ‘All my relations’ about respect. Kamloops Daily News. https://kamloopsnews.ca/kdn-opinion-columnists/wagamese-all-my-relations-about-respect/

Content prioritization is a way to organize things. Humans prioritize all the time whatever we do. An ESL teacher prioritizes a course content at the beginning of the semester after studying students’ diagnostic test results, and then the educator does that every day with the material for studies, according to the students present in class and their particular needs. Applied to algorithms, content prioritization means records “presented in a ranking order” (Noble, 2018, p. 123).

Algorithms are a sequence of actions to do to solve a problem or complete a task. There are several types of them: randomised, recursive, backtracking, basic graph, greedy ones etc. (Erickson, 2019). Similar to a prioritization technique, algorithms are here to make our life more organized too, and they analyze massive amount of information for that. We have to remember though that these helpful and expensive algorithms act with “ruthless pragmatism” (Crawford, 2021, p. 95), for the benefit of someone else as well.

Exploring search engines as modern algorithms, Noble (2018) warns us that “search is a mirror of users’ beliefs” (p. 15) and in today’s flawed, prejudiced and unfair society search results are pampered too. She points out that “results are then normalized as believable and often presented as factual” (p. 25). O’Neil (2017) develops on that stating that “many poisonous assumptions are camouflaged by math and go largely untested and unquestioned” (p. 7) and calls algorithms “opinions embedded in mathematics” (p. 21). She believes that algorithms disadvantage poor people and minorities because algorithms, people who use them, and society in general are not perfect. In this regard, Noble (2018) particularly worries about Google’s “considerable control over personal identity” and what can circulate online or be forgotten (p. 123).

Indeed, modern algorithmic bias is so obvious sometimes it looks absurd. If one tries to google “best movie of … (any recent year)”, they will be surprised with the very diverse results from different online resources. Assuming that those numerous rankings were made to attract a potential watcher, contradicting outcomes actually have the opposite effect – they turn people away from those unreliable recommendations.

Still, despite everything turning into content (Taylor, 2021), and algorithms urging people to pay attention to this and that, it is a person who makes a final decision, a conscious choice. For instance, Facebook posts in my news feed nudge me toward certain political, economical or cultural views every day. Moreover, my humane acquaintances who support Ukraine, Russia, Europe, or independent republics in what is going on in Ukraine want me to back up their position exclusively. But since 2014 I have learned how to navigate those contradictory demands safely.

I think algorithms impact my professional life positively: I like how they assist me in finding any specific information – Google’s ranking algorithm PageRank being exceptionally good at that, and I appreciate their personalization efforts even though I do not share much about myself online. I am glad that Canadian children learn coding and programming in school. Of course, those computational skills – decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithmic (i.e., logical) thinking – are nothing new for the psychologists. Still, it is good to know that mathematics is popular again.

That established Afro-American hairdresser from Noble’s (2018) negative algorithm example relied on Yelp too much for her business, in my opinion. She could have printed her own advertisements – with her photo and years of professional experience – and put them on every physical advertising site in her community. I am sure that owners of small businesses around would have gladly assisted her by positioning her messages near their entrances as a neighbour-to-neighbour favour.

If we accept that algorithms are valuable to us while they can also be for-profit, politicized and biased, it will make it easier to put up with their negative features and enjoy positive ones. Let us take YouTube’s business as an example. They play commercials with free videos and then suggest people should pay to avoid wasting time. Well, in these circumstances, my young yet already wise adult ESL students used to say, “Advertisement is an exercise in English listening too”, so we were not really bothered with those merchandising interruptions in class.

Or I get Canadian and world news from Yahoo.ca daily, mixed with barely hidden advertisements. If at first it felt unpleasant, currently I just skip any irrelevant information without thinking. I deal with other unwanted algorithmic recommendations pretty much the same way. I try not to impact PageRank or any other ranking systems by guarding my online presence. If I had a site I wanted to make more prominent though, I would write much on the topics that I am familiar with to create original and high quality content, would use keywords and hyperlinks, and make my pages internally linked for beginning.

Algorithms are a product of today’s world; they will be here with us for some time, and it is better for them, their creators and society to co-exist peacefully. Noble (2018) believes that search engines are “corralling and controlling the ever-growing sea of information” and to get accurate and neutral information one has to be more algorithmic literate (p. 25). It seems to me that sound scepticism and a bit of common-sense help see through any evil intentions too.

If we are cautious, use common sense and diversify, algorithms will stay friends.

References

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300252392

Erickson, J. (2019). Algorithms.  https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/book/Algorithms-JeffE.pdf

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown Publishing Group.

Taylor, A. (2021, February 2021). Are streaming algorithms really damaging film? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56085924

During the first two decades of the 21^st century, innovations have flourished worldwide: internet entering education, smartphones substituting laptops, electronic dictionaries replacing paper ones etc.

I witnessed how education without internet was giving space to education with internet in two European universities – Charles university in Prague, Czech Republic, and the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University in Ukraine – in 2007/09. I was a visiting scholar in the former and had been working since 1998 in the latter.

Internet was costly those days in both countries, and while both universities were actively using it in their administrative, research, and international activities, in education it was being done to a different extent.

For example, for ERASMUS students of Charles university in Prague, education with internet first and foremost meant reaching their schedule, administrative staff and professors, and submitting their assignments in the most convenient way. Yet internet was only an additional service for them as everything still existed in the material form too – a schedule on the wall, the translated textbooks in paper, administrative and professors’ offices etc. Students physically visited their lectures in the morning and libraries in the evening as huge funds of the university library had not been digitalized yet. Secondly, internet was a way to keep in touch with relatives and friends, and thirdly, internet provided entertainment. In this, ERASMUS students did not differ much from the general population of the Czech Republic who used internet mostly for reading news, looking for a job, and buying stuff then (Lupáč & Sládek, 2008).

At the same time, for full-time and part-time students of the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University of Ukraine, education with internet meant another educational tool that their professor might implement during their organized communication to make it more diverse. There were several computer classrooms, but no free wi-fi or cable Internet available to students on the university premises yet.

As modernization of higher education was a part of common European agenda (Commission of the European Communities, 2008), and the Czech government financed universities well (OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic, 2009), in addition to internet in its classrooms and dormitories, Charles university in Prague owned computer laboratories in its several campuses all over the capital city in 2007/08. Those laboratories were places for individual studies and entertainment in a free time. They had computers, cable and wi-fi internet available and were open from early morning till late at night – for students, professors, staff, and visiting scholars. I can assume that those laboratories assisted people with work and studying as well as distracted them from libraries, theatres, excursions, night clubs, in-person communication and shopping etc.

Higher education modernization was considered important in Ukraine too, but the concept was not supported by a state budget. As a result, education with internet got most attention at the institutional level, for instance, in 2007/08 the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University had several computer classrooms equipped with private university resources, and no computer laboratories with free internet for studies. In 2008/09, when smartphones became more wide-spread, the initiative moved to the individual level of professors to make internet more frequent in education and thus replace computers, CD players, some exercise books etc.

I cannot say that education with internet changed the well-known pedagogical approaches much. There is no doubt that it greatly supported individual studies in various disciplines. Internet was an extremely popular method of education in 2007/09, an additional tool that enjoyed everyone’s (polyphonic, in Citton’s terms) attention and was considered safe, time and resource saving. Despite any misconceptions about internet in that period of transition, it was clear that education with internet would not go away because it was exciting and convenient to every side involved – students, professors, university administrators, ministries of education, ministries of immigration, students’ parents etc. Citton (2016) described that innovative time best: “the materiality of the devices that will condition our attention tomorrow depends on the way in which our attention today selects certain properties offered by the devices produced yesterday” (p. 190). Indeed, computers without internet were useful things from yesterday in 2007/08. United in a global network, those computers became something much better and bigger that I as a teacher wanted to explore and pass to younger generations.

The pace and volume of the shift from education without internet to education with internet depended at first on state funding for computerization, and later, with appearance of smartphones and better availability of internet, – on attention of professors mostly.

To sum up, the example of both universities clearly demonstrates that a technology cannot emerge instantly and everywhere at the same time. It demands collective, joint, and individual attention, and good financing to displace the previous routine.

References

Citton, Y. (2016). The ecology of attention. Oxford: Polity.

Commission of the European Communities (2008, December 16). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: New skills for new jobs. Anticipating and matching labour market and skills needs. Commission of the European Communities Publishing. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0868:FIN:EN:PDF

Lupáč, P., & Sládek, J. (2008). The deepening of the digital divide in the Czech Republic. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2(1). https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4210/3251

OECD (2009). OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Czech Republic 2009. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264049079-en