A lot passes between people before they ever shake hands and meet properly. In the digital age, we have the ability to find out about a thing before we ever encounter it. Many people we ‘know’ about, we will never shake hands with. So, representation becomes very important: how things are represented in the media and in our education.

1. Before We Shake Hands: Representation and the Global Future of Education
by Chimaechi Ochei
Founding Director of Kio Global
A lot passes between people before they ever shake hands and meet properly. In the
digital age, we have the ability to find out about a thing before we ever encounter it.
Many people we ‘know’ about, we will never shake hands with. So, representation
becomes very important: how things are represented in the media and in our
education.
I’ve set myself a huge task – education, globalisation and digitisation – but I’ll break it
down into these steps:
1) Growing up in the digital age
2) The skills needed to navigate it
3) Teaching and learning those skills in class
4) Nigeria’s place in the future of education
Growing Up in the Digital Age
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you have a thousand pictures?
One of the hallmarks of the digital age is that we and our children are constantly
surrounded by images and text from:
• marketing – adverts, packaging, web ads, brand logos
• entertainment – films, videos, magazines, websites and books
• information sources – TV, news websites, newspapers
• social life – photos, videos and memes on social networks, and
• education – books and resources we use for school.

2. Another is that we are more likely than ever to be exposed to previously inaccessible
cultures, individuals and opportunities. You have access to nearly every other culture and
group, and they all have access to yours. Thus, we are all part of a global phenomenon.
Further, we are all touched by global problems. Have you noticed how local problems
tend to overlap strongly with global problems? People mishandling financial markets
in one part of the world affects almost the entirety of global trading. People
irresponsibly burning a high volume of non-renewable energies in one part of the
world changes the global ecology and affects farming prospects in other, far-flung
places. An armed, disenfranchised group of people in one place can halt or change
transit conditions for every international journey.
If there are global problems, education – which, in part, is passing on solutions, and
equipping young minds to create solutions – needs to be global in outlook too.
A third hallmark of growing up in the digital age is that peoples all over the world are
so much more likely to meet. We form digital relationships, and these can be global
too. But we are perhaps less likely than ever to shake hands with the many digital /
global acquaintances we have. We meet through:
• Global economics: You make products that I buy, or I make products you buy.
• Global online villages: You and I enjoy the same specialist interest group online.
• Global information: I read about you online.
So this is the world our nursery, primary and secondary students are growing up in.
Let’s pause here for a moment. Consider and reflect that the children enrolling in primary
school this year will retire around 2078. How on earth do we prepare them for that?
The Skills Needed to Navigate It
The burden of education is no longer to give access to facts. The digital age promotes
universal access to facts through the Internet. Good education encourages and enables
analysis.
I work with the Oxbridge Mentoring Scheme as a mentor to students who are

3. preparing for the Oxbridge application process. One tip from this scheme is that it’s
not about repeating what you’ve read in an interview. If you tell a specialist in their
field only what you’ve read in it, it will add little to them. (Chances are they’ve read it,
they wrote it, or they know the person who did.) What they want to see is your
understanding of what you’ve read. You may not even be ‘correct’, but if you can
articulate a logical hypothesis on how what you’ve read came about, what alternative
conclusions there may be, or what future projections there may be, you are showing an
understanding of it. You are adding something unique. You are learning.
Sound theoretical? Let’s see how these skills are practiced in various fields.
How things come to be: In Law, students learn to seek out precedents in order to help
them understand how contemporary law evolved and to help make successful future
cases.
Analysis and interpretation: In Mathematics, students learn that data can be presented in
a variety of statistical forms, and that each statistic can be interpreted in a number of
ways. Collecting data (the ‘facts’) isn’t even half the battle.
Future projections and alternatives: Economics students rely heavily on models and
patterns of supply and demand and to create future projections. They can isolate
variables within these models to check for alternative outcomes.
Education can prepare us for this global, digital age by teaching:
• Not only what is shown, but how is it shown; how may it have come to be?
• Not only facts, but analysis and interpretation
• Not only how things are, but conceiving of alternatives and future projections
Teaching and Learning These Skills in Class
For the rest of the session we will put these skills and knowledge into practice.
[Slide 7 – How are books made?:
An artist has an idea > communicates the idea to an agent or editor > editorial and

4. design deal with the details > publicity spread the word > sales handle delivery
logistics]
We are going to make biographies.
[Slide 9-11 - What is a biography? What does it include?]
Pair off, you’re going to interview one another and write one another’s biographies.
Find out how they came to be where they are now.
[A few Pulizer Prize-winning drafts later…]
Nigeria’s Place in the Future of Education
Now we’ve learned a little bit about how tricky it is to do someone else’s story justice,
and how it feels to tell our own story. I wonder about Nigeria’s story. How will it
continue? When I last came in 2008, I was shocked to find a children’s bookshop in
Ikoyi, Lagos that had no books that reflected its local audience in culture, images or
languages. At the time, I was working to publish a multicultural list of books at
Random House, in order to meet similar challenges in the UK. It felt, then, like
Nigeria’s story had someone else’s name on the front. If you don’t tell your own story,
someone else will.
You’re in a unique position: Nigeria could set a pattern for much of the world, as so
many nations’ economic, agricultural and cultural experiences are represented in this
one nation:
• Nigeria’s people are citizens of the world, with one of the most prolific, successful
and domestically-oriented diasporas.
• Nigeria is a combination of developed and developing. While I can use my phone
in Nigeria to access digital services that I can’t get in the UK, Nigerian public
transport is probably best described as ‘at own risk’.
• Nigeria is multicultural and multilingual, with children growing up exposed to
several ways of life.

5. • Nigeria is enterprising – you can’t afford not to think big.
• Nigeria offers rich natural resources and various climates.
• Nigeria is a combination of traditional and modern, with the roles of women
spanning the full gamut.
• Nigeria is always on the world stage - for good or ill, fashion or fraud, Nigeria is
perpetually in the spotlight.
This is a country well-positioned to lead in designing a globally relevant education
system. Like you, I am now in the spotlight. You can still see what I do, even if I forget
you’re watching.
Thank you for listening.
Chimaechi Ochei © March 2013