Digitalizing Folk Education: A Semiotic Modeling Approach

Cultural legacy, according to UNESCO, includes not only monuments and collections of artefacts, but also traditions and living expressions inherited from our forefathers and passed down to our successors. Folk literature, in the form of poems, lines, and melodies, is a part of cultural legacy, and its preservation for future generations appears to be crucial. The advent of technology in the post-covid era gave rise to a new perspective on the educational system. Folk education, which has never been regarded as a separate discipline in the sphere of primary education, is now in jeopardy as it is losing its cultural heritage in this digital age. It can only be preserved if it can be linked to newly developed technologies. The current research proposes the Socio-Digital Knowledge System, or SDKS, in light of this. This model deals with the detour of transition from the ‘as is’ to the ‘as ought to be’ reality, which can be considered the main grounds of folk education. The status ‘as it is’ of folk society represents the remaining varieties, not yet to be accounted for by any other educational developmental agencies. There may not be such instances of ‘remaining varieties’ in real. On the other hand, the ‘as ought to be’ educational system remains under development determined by surrounding political and socio-cultural parameters. This effort focuses on the nature of the psychology of the monolingual speakers’ collective self when they are obliged to maintain a tumultuous social environment with two poles, ‘as it is’ and ‘as it ought to be.’ In Indian communities, our model focuses on the ambiguous interpretation of social mobilization and hierarchy principles, as well as the imprecise term ‘class.’ To comprehend the mentioned bipolar possibility in terms of educational growth, we employ semiotic devices as a methodology.