New Digital Technologies: Educational Opportunities for Australian Indigenous Learners

Abstract

This article presents a number of possibilities that digital technologies can offer to increase access for Indigenous people to higher education in Australia. Such technologies can assist Indigenous high school students acquire the knowledge and skills they require to be accepted into higher education courses. They can also assist Indigenous students to be more successful in their higher education studies. While this article is contextualised to the Australian higher education setting specifically, the principles derived within may be applied to other disadvantaged groups worldwide. It may be concluded that the despite the barriers to the uptake of digital technologies, the potential offered holds much promise for such groups. In Australia, Indigenous people are the most severely under-represented in higher education, with access rates that have been declining over the past 6 years. Therefore, this issue has been classified as a matter of the highest national priority (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008, p. 16). Concurrently, evidence is mounting that digital learning environments are able to produce positive learning outcomes for Indigenous students, albeit with a number of barriers to their uptake. This literature review explores: current trends in digital technologies and tertiary instructional practices, barriers to the uptake of digital technologies for Indigenous learners in Australia, and the potential of digital technologies for accommodating Indigenous learning styles. A number of implications for practice are discussed, based on the review of the literature.

The Warramiri website: applying an alternative Yolŋu epistemology to digital development

“…The Warramiri website as a digital resource to aid transmission of Indigenous language and culture intersects with a number of pertinent and evolving theoretical frameworks; decolonising Indigenous methodologies (Smith 1999; Haebich 2014) ICT Indigenous pedagogies (Jorgensen 2013; Watson 2013) and Indigenous digital archiving (Nakata et al 2008; Gardiner et al 2011) to name a few. And there are some works which analyse the role of technology and broadly defined ‘literacy’ in remote Australian Indigenous settings similar to Gäwa in some ways (Kral 2012).…”

Development and Evaluation of Localized Digital Learning Modules for Indigenous Peoples' Health Education in the Philippines

“…Several considerations were included towards the creation of content for the digital modules and this study recognized the need for more culturally-aware content to better suit the needs of the intended users, which in this case, are the IPs of Mabalacat, Pampanga. One consideration is that most IPs tend to be visual learners [9] and mostly they use ICT resources for educational purposes [19]. Moreover, the intended users' cultural orientation and their contexts were considered in designing the scenes and personas (see Figure 2) to be used in the learning modules.…”

“…The use of ICT among IPs has been investigated in multiple contexts [9], [10], [11], [13], while the development, considerations, and integration of culturally-relevant teaching techniques and pedagogies for learners from diverse backgrounds in classroom settings were specifically explored in various studies as well [2], [4], [11], [18], [19], [20]. For one, Byrd [2] explored the effectiveness of culturally relevant teaching methods towards improved learning outcomes, increased engagement, and minimized achievement gaps among learners.…”

“…For one, Byrd [2] explored the effectiveness of culturally relevant teaching methods towards improved learning outcomes, increased engagement, and minimized achievement gaps among learners. Furthermore, Byrd [2] analyzed the learners' perspectives and concluded that academic outcomes are closely related to culturally relevant pedagogies [19]. The use of such pedagogies has proven to have a positive impact on learners [4], [11], [18], [20].…”

An ICT4D project for promoting health awareness programmes in indigenous community

“…The main ones are education, economic development, health, cultural continuity, governance, socializing and leisure. ICT can also offer increased access to indigenous people and assist indigenous people in acquiring the knowledge and skills they require [22].…”