In Search of Future Education in The Digital Age: Embracing Data literacy
Data literacy is still an emerging topic as the history of digitalization and data does not go back a long way, and yet the topic has found a way to be very fragmented. Some sources focus merely on numbers and statistics when it comes to data literacy whereas some others consider data literacy as a tool to support a reasoned argument (Bhargava & D’lgnazio, 2015).
As the importance of data increases, the necessity of data literacy manifests. Data literacy should go beyond being able to have numerical skills and needs to be unified with critical thinking (Grey, Bounegru & Chambers, 2012). Tygel and Kirsch (2015) name this concept as critical data literacy and define it as “the set of abilities (data reading, data manipulation, data communication and data production) which allows one to use and produce data in a critical way”.
Therefore, being critical data literate means to be able to understand data but before anything else, it means to first acknowledge that numbers and statistics can be incomplete, data might be discriminative and misleading, and the way data is collected might not be ethical and transparent (Fontichiaro et.al., 2017).
What critical data literacy education should be about is nicely summarized by the Children’s Commissioner of the UK stating, “Pupils should have a strong understanding of how data is generated, collected, shared and used online, for example, how personal data is captured on social media or understanding the way that businesses may exploit the data available to them.” (“Who knows what about me”, 2018).
Data, the black gold of the digital age, itself will not change the world but when people are equipped with skills and critical understanding of data, it will unleash the potential it has for the improvement of society (Tygel, 2016). Thus, data literacy is an essential skill for today’s students, tomorrow’s citizens and workforce as the traditional rules of society crumbles (Ridsdale et. al., 2015). Today’s pupils need to be able to turn data into information and knowledge, which means to be data literate. For data literacy to be taught, educators should go beyond the technical understanding of data and educate students about how data affects our society and equip them with the crucial skills for understanding data-society and data-human interaction. Only then will they be able to truly understand data and further develop their skills in order to read, manipulate, produce and communicate with data.
References:
Bhargava, R. & D’Ignazio, C.,(2015, September). Approaches to building big data literacy. In Proceedings of the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference. New York City, USA.
Grey, J., Bounegru, L., & Chambers, L. (2012). The Data Journalism Handbook. European Journalism Centre. O’Reilly Media, USA.
Tygel, A. F. & Kirsch, R. (2015). Contributions of Paulo Freire for a critical data literacy. First Data Literacy workshop. Oxford, UK.
Fontichiaro K., Lennex A., Hoff T., Hovinga K. & Oehrli J.A. (Eds). (2017). Data Literacy in Real World: Conversations and Case studies. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, USA.
“Who knows what about me?”. (2018). A Children’s Commissioner report into the collection and sharing of children’s data. Children’s Commissioner for England, UK.
Tygel, A. F. (2016). Semantic Tags for Open Data Portals: Metadata Enhancements for Searchable Open Data. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Ridsdale, C., Rothwell, J., Smit, M., Ali-Hassan, H., Bliemel, M., Irvine, D., … & Wuetherick, B. (2015). Strategies and best practices for data literacy education: Knowledge synthesis report. Dalhousie University, Canada.
