Philip Kerr presented on 'Data Literacy in a time of Covid' at the 5th annual Future of English Language Teaching Conference in October 2020.
This year’s pandemic has brought the issue of personal data into the spotlight, not least the thorny questions around track-and-trace to fight the virus. But with more learning taking place online (often with ‘free’ platforms and apps), more personal data (of both teachers and students) is being shared than ever before. Our students are rarely aware of the implications of sharing their data and, even if they are, they often don’t care.
This presentation introduced the idea of critical data literacy: what it is, why it matters, and what we can do to promote it.