The Datafied Present/Future

Digital technologies and data systems are increasingly pervasive in contemporary society and in higher education. However, concerns regarding surveillance, bias and exclusion connected to data-driven practices are beginning to emerge in scholarship and in popular media. These concerns raise questions about the role of higher education in fostering critical approaches to knowledge production, in a time when our institutional systems, from registration platforms through learning environments, are profoundly datafied. They also raise the issue of whether and how educators are prepared to navigate the increasingly complex questions datafication raises for our field, and what paths exist to build critical data literacies among higher education professionals.
This paper overviews how the concept of data literacy circulates in contemporary literature, and explore paths towards development of more complex and critical understandings of datafication among educators. The authors centre the paper around the Cynefin framework’s complicated/complex distinction and the gaps in the research literature on data literacy, then invite participants in the session to share their own data literacy perspectives and practices through brief, hands-on data visualization activities.