{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120520"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120520","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"The ‘digital transformation’ of Egyptian secondary education: From technological reason to technological realism","abstract":"Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-05-01","abstract_html":"Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-05-01","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Zayed, Hany"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Sociology","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Bayat, Asef","Herrera, Linda","Dill, Brian","Gille, Zsuzsa","Cuno, Kenneth"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-05","date_published":"2023-05","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z","subjects":["Education","Technology","Egypt"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["Copyright 2023 Hany Zayed"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120520","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Bayat, Asef","Herrera, Linda","Dill, Brian","Gille, Zsuzsa","Cuno, Kenneth"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Zayed, Hany"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2023-05","2023-04-20"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Sociology"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Education","Technology","Egypt"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2023 Hany Zayed"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120520"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-05-01","The student, Hany Zayed, accepted the attached license on 2023-04-17 at 17:38.","The student, Hany Zayed, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-04-17 at 17:51.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-04-20 at 16:30.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19019 on 2023-09-01 at 17:20:38","In late 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform program involving the ‘digital transformation’ of general secondary education. This included provisioning digital assessments, digital devices, digital content, digital learning platforms, digital infrastructure, and digital surveillance. Located within a state-wide project to build a New Digital Egypt and accelerated by Covid-19, this educational digitalization was encrusted with a discourse of technological essentialism, utopianism, solutionism, anti-humanism and inevitablism. In this dissertation, I ask how digital technologies are changing and reproducing educational institutions, learning and assessment processes, and social relations in Egyptian secondary education. As a critical sociology of educational technologies, this dissertation moves away from idealized visions of positive technological transformations. Instead, it examines the empirical realities, unintended consequences, and politics of those techno-educational reforms, situating them within their political-economic and socio-historical contexts. Building on fifteen-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt, I argue that digital technologies have been facilitating the platformization of Egyptian secondary education, embedding private actors in education, dissipating the pedagogical functions of schools, and pushing for an individualized form of learning. Nonetheless, digital technologies have simultaneously been facilitating the emergence of a collaborative ethic between students, enabling novel forms of digital collective cheating, instigating collective action and resistance practices in a youth subversive counterculture, and exacerbating inequalities based on internet access, data limitations, and technological capital. With those insights, I contend that digital technologies are not singular, stable and neutral, but plural, changing and political. Inserted in a particular socio-historical milieu, they do not necessarily solve the educational problems they intend to solve. Rather, they are used in creative ways, engender new problems, have unforeseen consequences, create winners and losers, and undermine the envisioned ‘transformation.’ Ultimately, digital technologies do not necessarily transform education, both in causing an immense disruption and in causing a good change."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["The ‘digital transformation’ of Egyptian secondary education: From technological reason to technological realism"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Bayat, Asef","Herrera, Linda","Dill, Brian","Gille, Zsuzsa","Cuno, Kenneth"],"dc:creator":["Zayed, Hany"],"dc:date":["2023-05","2023-04-20"],"dc:description":["Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-05-01","The student, Hany Zayed, accepted the attached license on 2023-04-17 at 17:38.","The student, Hany Zayed, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-04-17 at 17:51.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-04-20 at 16:30.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19019 on 2023-09-01 at 17:20:38","In late 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform program involving the ‘digital transformation’ of general secondary education. This included provisioning digital assessments, digital devices, digital content, digital learning platforms, digital infrastructure, and digital surveillance. Located within a state-wide project to build a New Digital Egypt and accelerated by Covid-19, this educational digitalization was encrusted with a discourse of technological essentialism, utopianism, solutionism, anti-humanism and inevitablism. In this dissertation, I ask how digital technologies are changing and reproducing educational institutions, learning and assessment processes, and social relations in Egyptian secondary education. As a critical sociology of educational technologies, this dissertation moves away from idealized visions of positive technological transformations. Instead, it examines the empirical realities, unintended consequences, and politics of those techno-educational reforms, situating them within their political-economic and socio-historical contexts. Building on fifteen-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt, I argue that digital technologies have been facilitating the platformization of Egyptian secondary education, embedding private actors in education, dissipating the pedagogical functions of schools, and pushing for an individualized form of learning. Nonetheless, digital technologies have simultaneously been facilitating the emergence of a collaborative ethic between students, enabling novel forms of digital collective cheating, instigating collective action and resistance practices in a youth subversive counterculture, and exacerbating inequalities based on internet access, data limitations, and technological capital. With those insights, I contend that digital technologies are not singular, stable and neutral, but plural, changing and political. Inserted in a particular socio-historical milieu, they do not necessarily solve the educational problems they intend to solve. Rather, they are used in creative ways, engender new problems, have unforeseen consequences, create winners and losers, and undermine the envisioned ‘transformation.’ Ultimately, digital technologies do not necessarily transform education, both in causing an immense disruption and in causing a good change."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120520"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2023 Hany Zayed"],"dc:subject":["Education","Technology","Egypt"],"dc:title":["The ‘digital transformation’ of Egyptian secondary education: From technological reason to technological realism"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Sociology"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z"}