ICITL 2021 Keynote Speakers

Professional biography：
Prof. Matthieu J. Guitton is Secretary (Vice-Dean) of the Faculty of Medicine, Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and at the Graduate School of International Studies of Université Laval (Quebec City, QC, Canada), Senior Researcher at the CERVO Brain Research Center (Quebec City, QC, Canada), and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Computers in Human Behavior family of journals (including Computers of Human Behavior, the world-leading journal in the field of cyberpsychology, and Computers in Human Behavior Reports), and serves on several other editorial boards, such as Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. A graduate from the University of Rouen and Université Pierre et Marie Curie – Paris VI, he obtained a PhD from the University of Montpellier (France) and was a Koshland Scholar / Postdoctoral Fellow of Excellence at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). His research deals with cyberbehavior, ranging from the study of virtual communities to eHealth, and from digital inequalities to cybersecurity.

Keynote speech abstracts:
The last year and half have brought unprecedented changes to our daily lifes. As for many fields, solutions to mitigate the dramatic impacts of the pandemic on education systems came from technology. The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the use of technology for education, both in terms of magnitude of its use and in terms of variety of the applications, with massive displacement of courses from face-to-face to distance modalities. For a lot of things, the pandemic has been a transformational crisis, and it is unlikely that we will move back to the pre-COVID situation. Instead, some of the changes which have occurred during the pandemic are going to be long-lasting. Thus, the importance of technology in education is only going to increase in the post-COVID era. Yet, while the benefits of technology for education are unquestionable, increasing the dependency of learning activities to technology bears the risk to add a new layer to pre-existing inequalities. Indeed, not all are equals when it comes to technology, and digital inequalities arise both for the hability to use technology and for its accessibility. In this presentation, we will discuss what are the main aspects of digital inequalities, what are their determinants in a post-COVID context, and how they potentially impact education systems. We will identify some of the challenges for students, teachers, researchers, and institutions alike, and explore how digital inequalities will be playing a critical role in strategies to democratize education.