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Copyright

Linda Herrera; Hany Zayed;

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 311–326

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

18. Motivations for the Digital Transformation of Education

Interview with Ahmed Daher

  • Linda Herrera (author)
  • Hany Zayed (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 311–326)
Ahmed Daher, Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Technology, has been at the forefront of the Ministry of Education and Technical Education’s digitalization change strategy. He explains its four main components: it facilitates different approaches to teaching, studying, and learning; it enables learners and teachers to access different resources through online platforms; it constitutes a mega infrastructural project to connect all schools and classrooms; and it has a business and enterprise side since it generates demand for new goods and services and contributes to the economy. He emphasizes that technology is not an end in itself, but a means of getting people to where the government wants them to go.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).

Hany Zayed

(author)
Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Cultural and Social Sciences at Marquette University

Hany Zayed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Cultural and Social Sciences at Marquette University. He earned his MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research covers the digital sociology of education, the political economy of educational technologies, digital social research methods, digital developmentalism, and social movements and collective action. His research has been published in The British Journal of Sociology of Education; Learning, Media and Technology; Theory, Culture and Society; and The Journal of Digital Social Research. His forthcoming book with MIT press entitled Digital Paradoxes, examines the contradictions between the utopian promises and messy realities of Egypt’s educational digitalization.