Education and the 2030 Agendaimpact on information and communications technologies

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed by all United Nations Member States in 2015, set 17 goals. Number four of these 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is Quality Education. Any paradigmatic shift in the 2030 Agenda and SDGs must consider education for developmental plans, universal access, and poverty eradication. The aim is to ensure inclusive and equitable education for everybody and to develop lifelong learning opportunities. Therefore, the 2030 Agenda has become a roadmap for Education issues. The purpose of this research is to deepen the study of the SDGs related to Education by analysing their impact on the information and communications technologies (ICTs), specifically on Twitter. To do so, 4,601 tweets, posted March 2021 to February 2022, using the hashtags #SDGs and #Education were analysed. New insights of value are offered based on this analysis, detailing more active corporate and personal accounts, tweets activity and contributors’ rankings.The underlying principle for unpacking Sustainable Development Goal Four (SDG4) for the 2030 Agenda is not inherent in the universal access to inclusive and equitable quality education [1]. This has become an interest for many Universities [2].As captured in other scholarly approaches, the tenets of the argument are to delineate education as a public good where there are shared societal endeavors in policy formulation and development [3]. However, within the growing paradigm shifts, attention among expert commentaries and research hypothesis is the meaning of the 2030 Agenda and SDG4 [4]. The overall meaning is that the 2030 Agenda and SDG4 must create sustainable and universal access to education [1,4]. Consensus is also built on how ICTs spread the word of the 2030 Agenda and education [5]. The scholars provide expert opinions on the conception of SDG4 and the primary objective of the goals. A recent seminal scholarly approach to explaining the meaning of SDG4 and 2030 Agenda is about gender equality in education that stakeholders can only achieve by inextricably linking gender issues to “Education for All” [6]. The criticality of the argument stretches the scope of the 2030 Agenda as a policy framework seeking to ensure that boys, girls, men, and women gain access to universal education through different cycles and their remuneration structures reflect equality.Applying ICTs and social network analysis related to educational research is still in an incipient phase [7]. The study of research using systems with multiple actors through ICTs and social media has already been addressed in other specialties [8]. Twitter is the most used platform in these analyses due to its open nature, offering the users the possibility of multiple interactions, establishing tracking relationships between accounts and historical data related to hashtags used in the tweets. The analysis of networks on Twitter has become a methodology through which one can map the activity and relationships of a community [9]. Twitter data analysis methodology can be extrapolated to educational debates [10]. In educational research we can find examples of the use of Twitter to determine the evolution of a network around a topic or to explore the educational debate related to sustainability identifying the actors with the greatest influence.