Disecting Sustainable and Green Education

Mark West works in UNESCO’s Education Sector in where he researches and writes about the future of education with a special focus on technology.

He develops projects and publications that help the international community identify opportunities and risks for education in an age of accelerating digital change.

Mark currently manages a team that seeks to clarify the educational implications of mainstream and frontier digital technologies, including AI. He looks at technological integrations in education through a broad and humanistic lens, considering their impacts on individual and community health and well-being, environmental and financial sustainability, and repercussions for the quality, equity, and accessibility of learning.

Mark coordinates the joint UNESCO-UNICEF Gateways to Public Digital Learning Initiative. It works directly with countries to help them ensure that education is supported online as well as offline. The Gateways Initiative facilitates international cooperation to strengthen digital learning opportunities that are free and open to learners, teachers and families.

Mark spent much of 2020 to 2023 researching the ed-tech experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring how practices and norms that emerged during this period are rippling into present and future of education. The culmination of this work is the UNESCO book 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?'. The publication has been well received by education and technology experts as well as various news outlets, including the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Prior publications of note include 'I’d Blush if I Could' (2019); 'Reading in the Mobile Era' (2014); and 'UNESCO Guidelines for Mobile Learning' (2013).

'I'd Blush if I Could' prompted leading technology companies to make changes to the way AI voice assistants project gender. It clarified how education can help close digital gender divides and was praised by media organizations around the world.

'Reading in the Mobile Era' brought international attention to the ways governments, schools and families can leverage inexpensive mobile technologies to advance literacy.

The 'UNESCO Guidelines for Mobile Learning' helped governments understand how to leverage increasingly ubiquitous technology to expand learning opportunities and enrich the vital work that happens in schools and classrooms.

Mark West works in UNESCO’s Education Sector in where he researches and writes about the future of education with a special focus on technology.

He develops projects and publications that help the international community identify opportunities and risks for education in an age of accelerating digital change.

Bryan Alexander is an internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of how technology transforms education.

He completed his English language and literature PhD at the University of Michigan in 1997, with a dissertation on doppelgangers in Romantic-era fiction and poetry.

Then Bryan taught literature, writing, multimedia, and information technology studies at Centenary College of Louisiana. There he also pioneered multi-campus interdisciplinary classes, while organizing an information literacy initiative.

From 2002 to 2014 Bryan worked with the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE), a non-profit working to help small colleges and universities best integrate digital technologies. With NITLE he held several roles, including co-director of a regional education and technology center, director of emerging technologies, and senior fellow. Over those years Bryan helped develop and support the nonprofit, grew peer networks, consulted, and conducted a sustained research agenda.

In 2013 Bryan launched a business, Bryan Alexander Consulting, LLC. Through BAC he consults throughout higher education in the United States and abroad. Bryan also speaks widely and publishes frequently, with articles appearing in venues including The Atlantic Monthly, Inside Higher Ed. He has been interviewed by and featured in the Washington Post, MSNBC, US News and World Report, National Public Radio, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, Pew Research, Campus Technology, and the Connected Learning Alliance.

He recently finished Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education for Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming fall 2019). His two most recent books are Gearing Up For Learning Beyond K-12 and The New Digital Storytelling (second edition) .