Across the world, design often begins quietly — with listening, with watching, with learning from the land and from one another. Patterns of endurance and ingenuity are woven into daily life: in the terraced hillsides that capture rain, in the marketplaces that connect people and ideas, and in the networks of kinship and collaboration that sustain possibility across distance.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of co-designing with universities across sub-Saharan Africa as a listening partner in their Digital Transformation Workshops as part of Phase II of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program e-Learning Initiative—spaces where educators, leaders, and technologists come together to reimagine how learning might unfold in a digital age. I, along with other team members at the University Design Institute, have visited 8 universities in 7 countries, meeting with key stakeholders including leaders, faculty, community members and students to develop a vision for the future of their institution. Bearing witness to these conversations has been a lesson in patience and in the quiet craft of building change.
In this work, I’ve often been reminded of the weaver bird — a familiar presence across the African continent and known for the intricacy of its nests. Each strand of grass is looped with deliberate care, tested, tightened, and returned to again. From a distance, the work may appear simple, but up close it reveals astonishing complexity and collaboration. In many ways, the patient, iterative labor of universities engaged in digital transformation mirrors this same spirit: each idea, partnership, and policy is a strand in the evolving architecture of higher education’s digital future.
Culture Before Code: Choosing the First Strand
Every act of transformation begins not with technology, but with purpose. Before tools, there must be trust; before systems, shared values.
As a listening partner across seven Digital Transformation Roadmap Workshops, I saw this truth reflected in how universities approached their work. Each institution arrived with its own digital story — past investments in online learning, infrastructure, and capacity — and an emerging vision for what comes next. These plans revealed a deep commitment to expanding access and improving the quality of teaching and learning. They were less about platforms than about people. While each university carried its own story, all were bound by a shared responsibility and resolve to reshape digital learning in their unique contexts.
As the workshops unfolded, teams began to see how these individual initiatives, when viewed through a shared framework, formed a coherent pattern of growth. The weaving became visible: each strand of innovation connected to others across leadership, policy, and pedagogy, creating a living system rather than a collection of parts.
Drawing on the African philosophy of Ubuntu, “I am, because we are,” we are reminded that lasting change grows from mutual care and collective responsibility. A digital strategy without trust is like a nest woven from brittle reeds—it cannot hold the weight of flight.
Transformation endures when leadership models curiosity instead of control, and when faculty feel safe to experiment, fail, and begin again. Students are a critical component of this formula, bringing end user perspectives and needs to the forefront. Culture is the tensile strength that keeps the weave from unraveling.
Listening as Leadership: The Tension that Holds
The weaver bird builds its nest under constant pressure—wind, gravity, predators. Each thread must be tight enough to hold yet flexible enough to move. That same tension animates digital transformation.
During the workshops, faculty and students often reflected that innovation was welcome—but only if it didn’t come at the expense of what makes teaching meaningful. Their concern was not about using new tools but about preserving the human connections at the heart of learning. Beneath those conversations was care, not resistance. Listening to such voices revealed that tension is not a flaw in the weave—it is what gives it strength.
The Concerns-Based Adoption Model1 helps explain this rhythm. People move through phases of understanding—first trying to grasp what change entails, then figuring out how it fits their work, and eventually exploring how it can make a difference for others. Each step is a new loop in the weave, tightening the fabric of collective learning.
In practice, this means creating spaces where uncertainty is welcomed as insight. It means adjusting timelines, rethinking expectations, and treating dialogue itself as design. Every conversation, like every loop of grass, binds the community closer.
The Postdigital Weave: Integration, Not Replacement
When a weaver bird’s nest nears completion, its pattern becomes invisible from within; it simply becomes home. So it is with digital transformation once it moves beyond novelty.
The workshops revealed that we have entered a postdigital era—a time when online and offline, human and technological, are inseparable. In other words, the digital is no longer something added to education; it has become part of the very way learning happens.
In other words, the digital is no longer something added to education; it has become part of the very way learning happens.
Neil Selwyn warns against “digital solutionism,” the urge to fix systemic issues with software. Sian Bayne and Jen Ross, in The Manifesto for Teaching Online, remind us that digital education is never neutral—it is ethical, embodied, and political. Postdigital practice, then, is an act of composition: interlacing pedagogy, equity, and infrastructure until they form a coherent whole.
I have seen this weaving firsthand—a lecturer recording a homemade video lecture for a local learning management system, a student mentoring peers through WhatsApp, a design team embedding accessibility as moral practice rather than compliance. These small, creative acts are the knots that give the larger structure integrity.
Reflexive Practice: Seeing the Pattern Emerge
A weaver bird often pauses, hanging upside down to inspect its work. That inversion—seeing from another angle—is the essence of reflexive practice.
During the Transformation Roadmap Workshops, universities mapped their aspirations, barriers, and assets across focus areas such as teaching and learning, student services, instructional infrastructure, leadership and culture, and partnerships. The exercise was both diagnostic and reflective—a way to glimpse the pattern forming beneath the surface.
No two nests were alike. Some looked skeletal but promising, others densely layered with overlapping initiatives. What mattered was not symmetry but coherence: could each institution recognize its own weave?
Through reflection, institutions often found themselves returning to earlier ideas—revisiting frameworks, redrawing maps, and refining priorities. What might have looked like repetition was, in fact, renewal. Each cycle of reflection strengthened understanding and alignment, much like a weaver looping back to tighten each strand so the whole nest can hold.
Evidence — whether in survey results, student feedback, or course outcomes — became the glint of sunlight through the grass: the data that revealed the weave. By tracking small movements —faculty trained, learners inspired, policies revised, new partnerships formed — institutions could finally see the shape of their collective nest.
The Weaver Bird as Method
Across sub-Saharan Africa, colonies of weaver birds create shared architectures that can span ten feet and house hundreds. Each nest begins with a single bird, looping grass until another joins, then another, until a network of nests hangs like an ecosystem in motion.
This image captures the collaborative ecology of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program e-Learning Initiative—a multi-phase effort to strengthen digital learning ecosystems across African universities. In Phase 1, pilot projects formed the first strands: faculty trained, studios established, and digital courses built to test what the new fabric of learning could become. In Phase 2, the weaving has grown wider and stronger. Through participation in the Transformation Roadmap Workshops, universities are linking those strands—connecting teaching, infrastructure, and culture into patterns of shared purpose and collective growth.
From Projects to Ethos: Weaving for Generations
The most durable nests are those built not for a single season but for future generations. In the same spirit, digital transformation must evolve from a time-bound project into a living ethos.
Institutions that thrive treat transformation as continual practice. They measure progress not in tools adopted but in the quality of relationships, the inclusivity of design, and the creativity of response. They understand that the weave is never finished; it must be maintained, repaired, and occasionally reimagined.
This shift — from project to ethos — marks maturity. It acknowledges that progress is non-linear, that strength comes from flexibility, and that leadership is more about care than control.
Yet the implications of this work extend beyond any single institution. As Edward Paice reminds us in Youthquake, Africa’s population is the youngest and fastest-growing in the world. By mid-century, one in three people on the planet will live on the continent. The systems being woven today — digital infrastructures, teaching practices, and networks of learning — will shape opportunity for generations of young people whose creativity, resilience, and leadership will define the world’s future.
In the language of the weaver bird, this is when the nest becomes part of the landscape: no longer an object of construction but a living part of its environment. The digital university, too, must learn to breathe with its ecosystem — to balance innovation with belonging, efficiency with empathy — and to weave a future strong enough to hold those yet to come.
Coda: The Weaver’s Patience
Standing beneath a colony of weaver birds, one can hear the constant rustle—the sound of persistence. No single bird sees the whole structure, yet each contributes to its endurance. The same quiet patience underlies the universities reshaping themselves through digital transformation.
Their work is deliberate, repetitive, often unseen. But strand by strand, through culture, listening, reflection, and design, they are crafting something resilient enough to hold future generations of learners.
In a recent essay, Arizona State University President Michael Crow described universities as the invisible hand that quietly shapes knowledge, innovation, and societal progress. Much like the weaver bird’s nest, this influence is built through unseen labor and long-term care — thousands of small, coordinated actions that together sustain a world of learning. Co-design then becomes an act of reflexivity: not merely including new participants but rethinking who is authorized to define knowledge, time, and progress. The strength of the digital weave lies not in perfect symmetry but in its capacity to hold difference — each strand tensioned by care, each voice audibly shaping the pattern that follows.
A young African artist named Somebody Tall shared, “The future can be bright if we all work together to unlearn and undo harmful patterns that have been woven into our mindsets and ways of life.” Transformation, after all, is not a race toward completion. It is the art of weaving possibilities from what is at hand—and having the courage to keep weaving even when the pattern is not yet visible. While there is an art to weaving, there is also discipline. I offer some threads for practice:
