Why we all need to be technologists

by Ariam Mogos, Laura McBain, Lisa Kay Solomon, Carissa Carter and Megan Stariha

Technology is power.

It can enable you to share an idea with millions of people around the world in a matter of seconds. And in those same few seconds, it can enable someone else to steal your identity and drain your bank account.

Whether it’s being used to spread information, incite violence, influence elections, or shop for glasses, who should have access to such powers? Who should be able to design and utilize technology to shape the world in their vision and image?

The present reality is that this power is in the hands of very few, and manifesting into serious consequences for the most marginalized people in the world. This is why we all need to be technologists. We all have the right to participate in and shape the growing influence technology has on our lives and communities, and build our digital agency. Whether you are the creator, user or policymaker, we all have a role in designing and deciding the future we all want to live in.

Today many emerging technologies (still in a phase of development and/or haven’t reached commercial scale) like machine learning, wearable tech, synthetic biology and others are often riddled with embedded biases (Ruha Benjamin, 2018). Computer scientist Joy Buolamwini found that three widely-used gender recognition tools could only accurately identify dark-skinned women as women from a photograph 35 percent of the time, while white men were identified as men 99 percent of the time (New York Times, 2018). This is a symptom of how emerging technologies are not created by diverse groups of people who reflect different values, life experiences, expertise, and take the responsibility to ensure all voices are represented in the design process.

At the d.school we believe educators are uniquely situated to address this critical issue. Educators have the capacity to shape a future in which all voices are represented and valued. They have the ability to equip students with the skills, mindsets, and dispositions needed to evaluate the ethical implications of technology and prioritize equity-centered design. But educators, particularly those who are serving students furthest from opportunity, need new resources to help students engage and create with emerging technology.

Educators experiment with the “I Love Algorithms” card deck designed by the Stanford d.school Teaching and Learning Studio. Photos courtesy of the Stanford d.school/Patrick Beaudouin.

We believe that design can play an important role in addressing the digital inequities that exist in our K-12 communities, and the challenges facing digital inclusion. Built on our ongoing exploration of emerging tech, equity, and design we are exploring questions like…

• How are emerging technologies used by different communities?
• Who is creating emerging technologies like machine learning, blockchain, and synthetic biology?
• Who is not being represented in the creation and pioneering of these emerging technologies?
• How are oppressive social structures and practices, like racial profiling, manifesting in the early stages of the creation and application of emerging technologies? Why?
• How might we equip educators and students with the creative confidence to understand, evaluate, and create with emerging technologies in their communities?

These questions and the research we’ve done are leading us to this design challenge:

How might we leverage emerging technologies to advance equity, empathy, and self-efficacy in K-12 education?

Our design work is grounded in four pillars of understanding, centered around participation and radical access, built on the early design work from Carissa Carter’s You Love Algorithms:

1. It’s not about becoming a coder; it’s about knowing what the code can do (Carissa Carter, 2018). We all need to understand what emerging technologies can do, how they’re interlinked, and how they can be designed by increasingly diverse groups of creators and decision makers. This means that each of us should have a basic understanding of how emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, brain computer interface technologies, etc. work. Does that mean we’re all verifying transactions on a blockchain? No. But it does mean that we understand it’s rooted in decentralization, transparency, and immutability, and why some systems may or may not benefit from using blockchain.
2. If we want emerging technology to represent all of us, it needs to be created by all of us (Carissa Carter, 2018). Technology needs to be inclusive. Creation encompasses more than just technical production or programming, it means all of our experiences, perspectives and voices are incorporated in the creation, adaption, and delivery of the technology. It requires that we all have an understanding of the concepts underlying emerging technology, and that each of us are an integral part of the design process.
3. Technology is personal. Educators need support with how to cultivate and leverage the valuable digital practices and identities their students bring into the classroom (Matt Rafalow, 2018). To cultivate students’ abilities and support them in connecting with emerging technology, we need to consistently find ways to make technology personal to them. If students don’t recognize themselves or their communities in the technology they are using or designing with, this only further marginalizes them and reinforces embedded bias.
4. Learning is about lifelong participation and creation; not consumption. Constructionism has shown us that the most powerful learning experiences emerge from creating something from our own curiosity, understanding, knowledge, and experience of the world. There is nothing more rewarding than designing something that solves a problem for you and the people you care about in your community.

How we are getting started.

In our pursuit to expand radical access to emerging technology and to cultivate a diverse generation of technology creators, we’ve launched we have launched an open source curriculum to help build the creative and digital agency of K12 communities.

Educators will find engaging activities which will help them understand and teach the foundational concepts of emerging technologies, along with easy-to-adapt community-based design challenges. We kicked off the playtest of two of our first resources at the first ever K12 Futures Fest, a gathering of more than 200 educators, students, and other community members who showcased their work and engaged in our new experiments.

Educators participate in a Futures Fest session on Blockchain. Photos courtesy of the Stanford d.school/Patrick Beaudouin.

Educators participated in a session which immersed them in the blockchain concepts of decentralization and transparency through taking on the persona of detectives tasked with cracking unsolved mysteries; and in another session, designed their own dance moves to express different machine learning algorithms. Participants pushed back on the perceived benefits of the technologies, rapidly came up with new ideas for how they might apply these technologies to new design challenges, and asked thought-provoking questions about the potential impacts on their students.

As our prototypes and learning evolve, we aim to share our work on the K12 Lab site. And we hope to encourage more educators to take up this challenge in their own communities by adopting and remixing these resources to fit the diverse needs and identities of their students.

Our collaborators include a crew of pioneering educators: Kwaku Aning, Louka Parry, Jennifer Gaspar-Santos, Akala Francis, and Daniel Ramos. They are each collaborating with us to create, integrate, and adapt these resources in their own contexts.

On the horizon.

In 2020 Karen Ingram, a designer who has a special focus on synthetic biology will join the team as an Emerging Tech Fellow.

How to learn more?

Want to learn more about our work? Read updates here. You can also join our newsletter for updates and events!

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References:

1. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.
2. Lohr, S. (2018, February 9). Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html.
3. Green, B. (2019, April 17). Can predictive policing help stamp out racial profiling? — The Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/04/17/can-predictive-policing-help-stamp-out-racial-profiling/7GNaJrScBYu0a5lUr0RaKP/story.html.
4. Matt Rafalow (2018). Disciplining Play: Digital Youth Culture as Capital at School. American Journal of Sociology. 123:5, 1416–1452.