På uddannelsesområdet er fokus på dataetik vigtigt, men ikke tilstrækkeligt

I en serie af blogindlæg, har jeg rettet fokus mod nogle af de udfordringer og til tider uheldige konsekvenser, der er forbundet med at anvende digitale teknologier i uddannelse, undervisnings- og læreprocesser – det har jeg gjort ud fra et overordnet perspektiv på databehandling, -sikkerhed og -etik.

  • I det første indlæg blev scenen sat via udvalgte resultater fra et par aktuelle undersøgelser fra Epinion. Her var der bla. fokus på det dilemma lærere kan opleve ifm. anvendelse af ‘gratis’ digitale teknologier, der ofte lader meget tilbage at ønske ift. databehandling, – sikkerhed og -etik.
  • I det andet indlæg beskrev jeg, med udgangspunkt i min egen undervisningserfaring, hvorfor det kan være pædagogisk-didaktisk interessant at inddrage ‘gratis’ digitale teknologier i undervisnings- og læreprocesser og hvilke kritiske overvejelser, det kan give anledning til.
  • I det tredje indlæg beskrev jeg en debat i Altinget:Uddannelse, hvor en ph.d. studerende, Lucas Lundbye Cone (AU) på den ene side problematiserede Aarhus’ kommunes beslutning om at indkøbe Chromebooks til alle folkeskolens elever, og hvor kommunen på den anden side forsvarede beslutningen. Indlægget tjener som et fint eksempel på, hvor kompleks problemstilingen med ‘gratis’ digital teknologi, men også betalingstjenester, fra de store techgiganter og andre it-leverandører, er.
  • I det fjerde indlæg beskrev jeg 16 eksperters bud på behov for kompetenceudvikling i uddannelsessektoren (fra grundskole til VEU). Her blev der peget på et særligt behov for viden og handling ift. tekniske sikkerhedsforanstaltninger, forretningsmodeller, etik, radikalisering og ekstremisme, grooming samt kritisk stillingtagen. Vigtigt var også eksperternes påpegning af at emner inden for feltet cyber- og informationssikkerhed gøre til et fælles anliggende for alle – også uden for uddannelsessektoren.

I dette sidste indlæg forsøger jeg at samle op. Det er ikke nogen helt nem opgave, da indlæggene har strittet i forskellige retninger, hvilket kan skyldes, dels at jeg selv er forvirret og i tvivl om mange ting, og dels at der rent faktisk er tale om en ret kompleks problemstilling. Nemlig; hvordan sikrer vi en passende balance mellem pædagogik og digitale teknologier – bla. under hensyntagen til databehandling, -sikkerhed og -etik? Groft set, tegner der sig for mig at se to forskellige tilgange ift. vægtningen mellem pædagogik og digitale teknologier.

I den første tilgang vægtes pædagogikken højest. Det så vi bla. i det første indlæg, hvor Epinion i deres undersøgelser nåede frem til, at lærere anvender en mangfoldighed af digitale teknologier, hvilket afspejler, at lærerne kan have mange forskellige pædagogiske formål med at inddrage digitale teknologier i deres undervisning. Epinion fandt også, at det var meget forskelligt, hvor mange overvejelser, lærerne gjorde sig omkring datasikkerhed, og at det var de pædagogiske overvejelser og hensyn, der vejede tungest. Det samme gjorde sig gældende i det andet indlæg, hvor jeg beskrev mine egne undervisningserfaringer og overvejelser.

I den anden tilgang vægtes digitale teknologier højest. Om det er helt retfærdigt at lade Aarhus Kommune være et eksempel på denne tilgang, vil jeg lade op til læseren selv at vurdere. Men som vi så i det tredje indlæg, hvor ph.d. studerende Lucas Lundbye Cone  (AU) problematiserede kommunens forestående indkøb af Chromebooks, så gik (for)svaret, fra økonomi- og administrationschef, Hardy Pedersen på, at disse digitale teknologier overholder gældende lovgivning fx. ift. persondata. Set fra kommunens synsvinkel er der styr på databehandling og -sikkerhed, men der blev ikke nævnt noget om det dataetiske (i denne sammenhæng forstået som ‘googlificeringen’ som Cone også problematiserede). Ift. pædagogikken gik svaret på det paradoks, der generelt ligger i ‘branding’, som øger risikoen for elevers tilvænning ved valg af bestemte produkter.

Det fjerde indlæg adskiller sig, da der her var tale om forskellige eksperters bud på behov for kompetenceudvikling inden for området. Her var udgangspunktet altså, at der var en form for mangeltilstand blandt elever, lærere og ledere i uddannelsessektoren ift. anvendelse af digitale teknologier. Derfor var fokus naturligt på digitale teknologier, og det var især anvendelse af ‘gratis’ sociale medier, der blev problematiseret. Der blev efterlyst et generelt holdnings- og adfærdsskifte, som iflg. eksperterne kunne ske gennem bedre rammesætning og nytænkning af undervisning inden for området. Der var forskel på de 16 eksperters holdninger, men der var flere som mente, at databehandling, -sikkerhed og -etik bør vægte højere end evt. pædagogiske intentioner og hensyn.

Jeg hælder selv til, at vi skal forsøge at skabe en bedre balance. Naturligvis nytter det ikke noget, at der gås på kompromis med databehandling og -sikkerhed. Hvad angår dataetik, mener jeg, at det er et vigtigt, men utilstrækkeligt fokus i en pædagogisk kontekst. Det kan diskuteres, hvad der mere præcist ligger i begrebet dataetik, men DataEthics.eu,  der en tænkehandletank, som arbejder for at fremme dataetiske produkter og tjenester, anvender eksempelvis følgende definition:

Dataetik er ansvarlig og bæredygtig brug af data. Det er det “rigtige” at gøre i forhold til mennesker og samfund. Dataprocesser bør være designet som bæredygtige løsninger – dvs. først og fremmest til gavn for mennesker.

Dataetik handler om at opfylde de principper og værdier, som menneskerettighederne og persondatalovgivningen bygger på. Det handler om ærlig og ægte gennemsigtighed i datahåndteringen. Om aktivt at udvikle privacy by design og  privacy-fremmende produkter og strukturer. Om at behandle andres personlige oplysninger som man selv ønsker ens egne – eller ens børns – skal behandles.

Dataetik er skridtet videre end  efterlevelse af persondatalovgivningen: Alle dataprocesser respekterer derfor som minimum de krav, der er opstillet i EU’s Persondataforordning (GDPR), EU’s Charter om grundlæggende rettigheder samt den Europæiske Menneskerettighedskonvention.

Jeg synes, at det er en udemærket definition, som fint kan anvendes på et overordnet niveau, men når det kommer til anvendelse af digitale teknologier i uddannelse, så tænker jeg ikke, at det er tilstrækkeligt at have fokus på dataetik. Først og fremmest ligger der en udfordring i, at digitale teknologier reduceres til et spørgsmål om data*. Herudover tænker jeg også, at anvendelse af digitale teknologier i uddannelse må bero på mere end ‘de principper og værdier, som menneskerettighederne og persondatalovgivningen bygger på’. Her mener jeg, at der må være nogle pædagogiske principper og værdier, der også skal tænkes ind. Når der anvendes digitale teknologier i uddannelse, handler det ikke kun om at beskytte, dem som genererer data, men også om at udvikle deres dømmekraft og myndighed ift. netop anvendelsen – og det må gælde på alle niveauer i skoler og institutioner.

Og så er det, for mig at se, at det begynder at blive komplekst. Mens der nok, i Danmark, kan være enighed om vigtigheden og overholdelsen af menneskerettigheder og lovgivning, så retter pædagogiske principper og værdier sig mod grundlæggende spørgsmål som, hvorfor og hvordan vi holder skole og uddannelse – og her er der mange modsatrettede bud og mange forskellige aktører, der alle har legitim ret til indflydelse.

I figuren herunder, har jeg forsøgt at skitsere de forskellige aktører, der kan tænkes med i et økosystem over anvendelse af digitale teknologier i uddannelse.

Mit (foreløbige .. jeg tænker stadig) bud vil være, at etik gøres til et fælles omdrejningspunkt i spørgsmål om anvendelse af digitale teknologier i uddannelse, undervisnings- og læreprocesser. Det udelukker ikke et samtidigt mere snævert fokus på dataetik, men når eksempelvis Cone problematiserer ‘googlificeringen’, så mener jeg, at det rækker ud over det rent dataetiske. Så er det også et spørgsmål om moral, værdier, normer og ikke mindst vaner i den pædagogiske del af systemet. Udfordringerne bliver ikke nødvendigvis nemmere at håndtere ved at gøre etik til omdrejningspunkt, men jeg tror, at det vil kunne indfange flere vigtige aspekter.

Et anden væsentlig pointe er, at alle disse aktører må samarbejde, hvis der skal findes meningsfulde svar på spørgsmålet om, hvordan vi sikrer en passende balance mellem pædagogik og digitale teknologier – bla. under hensyntagen til databehandling, -sikkerhed og -etik. Og i denne sammenhæng, må der også tænkes i mellem- og overstatslige samarbejder og løsninger, da mange af de mest anvendte digitale teknologier, jo netop ikke er produceret i Danmark.

/Marianne

*) Det er en udfordring, som jeg vil vende tilbage til i en kommende blogserie om brug og betydning af data i uddannelse.

Grokking Virtual Worlds

On Edudemic‘s site I read about a new tool called instaGrok – a search engine targeted at education – that I decided to try out.

About instaGrok


Start “grokking”

You can start “grokking” immediately, but to be able to use the features properly, you need to log in, and so I decided to log in and do a search on Virtual Worlds;

Search for Virtual Worlds

  1. You can adjust the level of difficulty/detail via the slider
  2. The users’ search history is saved
  3. Search results are shown as Key Facts, Websites, Videos, Images, Quizzes, and Concepts. Key Facts and Quizzes enable clicks on “more” information leading to original sources. Results can be pinned and will show on the graph, in the journal, and under the visited tab.
  4. There are 3 displays to choose from
  5. You can share by e-mail or Twitter (currently there seems to be a bug though; my tweet showed a dead link). Sharing is apparently limited to the original query – not the one you’ve pinned?
Click on the nodes to increase the search
Journal display
Edudemic highlights the quizzes, but I have to admit that I’m not a fan of quizzes – not here, not in general. The questions generated from the search seem to result in some rather strange questions that test the user’s grammatical skills, rather that his/her general knowledge of the topic;

Examples of quizzes

Apart from the quiz section, I think it’s a rather nice tool. I like the fact that you can visualize your queries and the journal feature could also be very useful. Edudemic predicts that Google will buy instaGrok, and that seems very plausible. I think the tool has the potential to evolve into something very useful. Some of the improvements I’d like to see would be:

  • View History without having to do a search first – make available the History tab once the user logs in
  • A “save” tab – it saves instantly, but for the UX I think a tab would seem reassuring (he, but that could be just me ;-)
  • Ability to download the different displays
  • Ability to share pinned queries
  • Ability to co-create
  • More image examples
  • Some sort of ” summarized result” for the quizzes to increase the gamification element
  • Improved search results – i.e. the first pin/example under Key Facts in my search is a wikipedia article on Virtual world language learning …

Anyways, I think instaGrok is a tool to keep an eye on :-) Follow here on twitter.

/Mariis

Mariis – Liking and linking #Thinglink

Whenever I run courses in SL the participants naturally always ask for interesting places to visit, and every time I start a new course I spend a lot of time creating/updating notecards. I’ve long been considering creating a wiki or the like, but must admit I never really had the energy. Through twitter I recently heard of a new tool, Thinglink that enables you to tag/put several links on photos. I’ve only been exploring it for a couple of days, but was so impressed with it that I decided to make use of it to solve my “SL place problem”, and voila my new blog:


When you hover over the pictures little rings with links will appear.

For now I’ve just posted a few places, and only in SL, but I’m hoping the blog will grow in time. I really appreciate the ability to link – something which I think will be a time saver – especially because you don’t have to log in to the blog to edit/remove links, you just need to be logged into Thinglink. Thinglink is really, really easy to use – my only problem was that WP only allows the plugin on self hosted WP-blogs, so I had to create a new place and chose Blogger after trying a few other options. Evidently, Thinglink can be used for anything and the tool has already caught the attention of educators – see for instance @AuntyTech‘s Educate with Thinglink :-) W00T!

/Mariis

Great field trip to Pathfinder’s Jibe world

One of the classes I’ve been teaching this spring has been dealing with interpersonal CMC, and as part of this I have of course been talking about avatar-based communication. Based on my experience with bringing newbies into SL, I knew that I had to find another example of a 3D Virtual World to use with this particular class that had 89 students. During the 5th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education Conference  (March 15-17, 2012), I ran into John “Pathfinder “Lester, and I was reminded of the Jibe platform created by ReactionGrid .

Pathfinder is currently Chief Learning Officer at ReactionGrid Inc., but worked for LL/SL for five years where he led the development of education and healthcare, and I’ve actually met Pathfinder a couple of times in RL too – even here in Denmark :-) I’ve been following Pathfinder’s work with alternate Grids/worlds since he left LL, and I consider him a true innovator and visionary within the field of 3D Virtual Worlds.

So on March 19th, I decided to try to bring my class into Pathfinder’s Jibe world. Being used to many technical obstacles with SL, I did not know exactly what to expect. As it turned out only a few of the students had any experience with 3D Virtual Worlds (and only from WoW and The Sims), so I was admittedly a bit worried. However, from a technical point of view things went very well – I was really impressed with just how easy it was for the students to start using Jibe! Some of the students had to install a Unity3d plugin (the player), but that didn’t cause any problems and within minutes from showing the students the url, they were in-world gaining their first experiences with navigating a 3D-avatar. I have rarely heard students laugh this much in class!

All the students on laptops managed to get into Jibe without any problems, but a few of the students use iPads, and sadly Jibe/Unity3d doesn’t work on those yet. I did try to see if I could access Jibe via Chrome in the AlwaysOn PC app, but no ;-) In user forums on Unity3d I’ve read about attempts to jailbreak the iOS and work around the plugin need, but this is not a solution I’m going to pursue or even recommend to my students, so for now we’ll have to settle for using laptops, and that’s ok.

These 2. semester students had a very limited knowledge of 3D Virtual Worlds, and even though I did demonstrate SL, being able to access and play around on their own in such a world really enhanced their understanding. They did find the whole idea of using 3D Virtual Worlds for serious purposes quite exotic, and it will take much more time (and practice) to convince them of the virtues of such communication media. However, based on this very positive (especially from a technical point of view) experience, I will try to learn more about Jibe and consider if I can somehow use it in my future classes. Compared to SL, Jibe has three very important features that makes it an interesting platform in relation to my (often times very large) on-campus classes:

  • The platform easily holds 100+ participants
  • The platform is browser based
  • The platform is very user friendly – at least in terms of initial UX

For demonstration and first hand experience of avatars and 3D virtual environments, this makes Jibe very interesting. Further, Jibe supports industry standard 3D modeling programs and scripting, and that could also make it an interesting tool to use for some of the more advanced classes where our students have to learn this, and perhaps this could mean that more colleagues would take an interest in this type of technology. As much as I love SL, I really think that the future of 3D Virtual Worlds will be browser based, and to further enhance interoperability standards are a must, so Jibe really seems to be heading in the right direction.

Here’s a short introduction by Pathfinder, and be sure to follow his blog, if you want to learn more :-)

On ReactionGrid’s own blog there were some interesting news today;

  1. An open source version of Jibe is underway officially today.  LearnNC & ReactionGrid are partnering to allow teachers and students to qualify for no cost editions of Jibe.
  2. Jibe-Enterprise is now available for corporate training, meetings, collaboration and more.
  3. Jibe-Blend is also underway.  Jibe-Blend is a real-time shared collaborative building system which allows users to model in Blender and stream their work live into a Jibe/Unity3D world.

/Mariis

Interesting news regarding Kitely – 3D VW on demand service

Over on Ener Hax’ blog there are some very interesting news regarding Kitely – a 3D Virtual World “on demand” service;

  • Kitely now has a very favorable billing system in place
  • Kitely will soon open up to both email and Twitter logins – so far it has been restricted to Facebook users
  • Kitely is working on LDAP integration
Almost a year ago,  I logged in to Kitely for the first time. After just installing the Kitely plugin and a few easy clicks, I was able to login to my own “world”.


My first Kitely “world” – Mariis’ Meta – on March 28th, 2011 – accessed via the SL viewer.

Accessing Kitely via the SL viewer, there was something very familiar to this new “world”. I’m placing world in double quotes because it’s not a world in the common (SL) sense, the “worlds” are not connected in the way we know from SL, but function more as separate grids, where you have to access other “worlds” via the Kitely website (but I think they’re working on a teleport system too). On the other hand, there was something very strange (at least to me) about this new “world”; I had to use my RL name for my avatar because of the required Facebook login. Back in the spring of 2011, I was already fed up with Facebook, and I eventually decided to leave Facebook in August, 2011. I still thought the idea of being able to access VW-settings in an easy, affordable, and “on demand” way, was quite brilliant, so I’m very happy to see the recent news on the upcoming changes. One of the trends, we’ve seen in the growing field of VWs, is that they’re becoming “situational”. And because less sometimes is more, I think Kitely really represents a very interesting option in the field.

As an educator the upcoming LDAP integration also sounds very interesting because it would enable an easy way of adding larger groups of students. I have to admit that I haven’t been following the development of Kitely closely, so I’m not sure exactly how they plan to go about the future changes, but the Kitely founders seem impressingly willing to listen to their users, and there is also some indication that they are working on other education-related features.

So far, my educational use of VWs has been restricted to my adult, distance ed students because I run longer courses with this kind of students that I do with my younger on-campus students. However, with Kitely I see possibilities of introducing the concept of VWs in a much easier way, so I’ll be back in Kitely to explore and have more fun as soon as they implement the new changes :-)

/Mariis