Data, Power & Pedagogy, a three-day workshop held for educators and researchers on September 27-29, made space to build teaching resources centered on data, surveillance, and targeted advertising.
Most people do not understand how much of their data is collected on a daily basis, or how that data is used to profile and target them. Educators need practical classroom tools to teach students about data harvesting and profiling by advertisers, social media platforms, and governments, to help their students make informed and ethical choices about their privacy.
To meet this need for practical resources, the Information Futures Lab, in partnership with HestiaLabs, convened educators working in data science, media literacy, and education to bring the challenges of “surveillance capitalism” to life in the classroom.
Over the three-day immersive workshop participants developed tools to:
- Set up collaborative data experiments to spark classroom discussions and research;
- Identify connections between data privacy, equity, ethics, and health;
- Develop pedagogical ethics to address challenges facing collaborative data projects in university or research settings.
Based on this workshop, the IFL is working with participants to develop a series of lesson plans and teaching resources that are free for use and distributed to educators around the country, with credit to each of our participants.
This workshop was the second event of IFL’s Sandbox Series — weeklong sprint projects that bring together experts to design practical, cross-disciplinary solutions to information problems.