Sickness: illiteracy as a fatal illness? | Steven Duggan | TEDxUCD

Over 750 million adults, more than 1 in 4 on the planet, are illiterate.

Given the direct impact illiteracy has upon infant mortality, child welfare and maternal health, not to mention economic progress and armed conflict,

Steven argues in his TEDxUCD 2015 talk that we need to view illiteracy as a health epidemic, and devote the same resources, we allocate to crises such as the Ebola outbreak, in tackling this issue.

He also asks the question if given rapid advances in the ubiquity and power of mobile technologies, whether illiteracy is becoming an epidemic “for which the vaccine is already in people’s pocket.”
Steven Duggan is a UCD graduate who has worked in education for over 30 years, and is now the Director of Worldwide Education Strategy at Microsoft Corporation.

Keeping with the theme of sickness, Steven also shares details of his own recent health diagnosis, the stigma which surrounds it, and how it has shaped and informed his work in this area.
Steven Duggan, is Director of Worldwide Education Strategy at Microsoft Corporation.
Steven graduated from University College Dublin with a BA and H.Dip. in Education.
He is currently a member of the Governing Board of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE). A former Head of English, he is a passionate educator with a particular interest in the needs of underserved learners and communities. The writer and presenter of the award-winning documentary feature The First Mile (RGI Films, 2014) his views on education have featured in press and radio and in a variety of publications, most recently as a contributor to Towards A New End: New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (Michael Fullan, Maria Edgeworthy, 2014).
Twitter: @steven_duggan

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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