Digital Praxis for Disseminating the French Language and Culture Globally A panel discussion in the National Assembly at the first session of the Assembly of French citizens abroad (7 October 2014)

Honourable Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen, Advisors of the Assembly of French Citizens Overseas, Distinguished Ambassadors, Dear representatives of the Government and economic stakeholders, I thank you for coming here to discuss the issues involved in promoting the Francophonie through digital praxis. The French Citizens abroad are meeting for the first time after the reform. I am delighted that they are having a new forum to voice their views. With the increasing mobility of our fellow citizens, I firmly believe that digital praxis can bring solutions. Likewise, the Attali report on August 26 to the French President highlights digital praxis as a platform for promoting French language and French people beyond our borders. The round table will address issues based around three themes: Our discussions will certainly be very fruitful. I call Gérard Wormser who does us the honour of moderating this round table. There is a need to develop e-learning courses and to enable students to access qualifying courses. Those who are taking online courses must have degrees recognized by the University. Proposal no. 44 provides students with a digital platform for monitoring. The French High school abroad is a wonderful tool. Students are not monitored at this stage but are a great strength for our country. I would encourage you to download the Ferry report 3.0 on digital education. The honourable Member, dear Christophe, Distinguished Ambassadors, I would like to thank you for the invitation. We are both elected representatives from Northern Europe. Christophe is a French language specialist and I am a digital technology expert. This is the first time I am speaking on this twofold theme. Interestingly enough, La Francophonie is at the heart of my own personal story. I am a French-speaking citizen in Quebec that Gille Vigneault called “the vast land without borders, a French-speaking nation from within, the invisible, spiritual, mental, moral land that is in each of you.’ The digital field falling under my responsibility involves another value community, form of friendship, cooperation, sharing through innovative tools, but essentially similar in their ways of being and doing. The Francophone diffusion curve systematically follows the projected deployment of Internet use in Africa. Between 1998 and today, the number of Internet users has increased from three hundred thousand to three billion. With the digital and Francophone future in Africa, we need to rethink our analytic models based on a pre-eminence of European speakers for decades. We must enhance the worldwide use of French vis-à-vis English. My colleague Annick Girardin will expand on educational issues related to learning French. We need to widen access to French language through digital praxis. As a result, I launched the French version of the online interactive platform called CODECADEMY that offers free coding classes with real professional opportunities and provides young people, wherever they are, with an avenue for creative expression in the digital world. Developing educational content from the digital content Frameworks, scientific-cultural terminology and value will increasingly be created by using digital educational tools. I commend the pilot action undertaken by the AEFE, which in association with the CNED is capable of testing innovative solutions in this highly innovative field. The figures show the parallelism between digital praxis and Francophonie, which is now finding it hard to exist in the digital world. First, since digital praxis was born in Silicon Valley and its historical roots are so deep that American soft power now dominates the digital world to a point where all the vocabulary borrowed from this universe is in English. I am often accused of using the words “start up’, “scale up’, “digital’, “corporate venture’, “business angels’, …