Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

It has been a few weeks since we issued our #DigCiz call for thoughts on the question “What do we owe students when we collect their data?” and there have been a few responses. The call is in conjunction with the interactive presentation at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that I’ll be helping to facilitate with Michael Berman, Sundi Richard, and George Station. The session will be focused around breakout discussions both onground and online during the session. We don’t necessarily have “answers” here – the session (and the call) are more about asking the questions and having discussion. The questions are too big for one session and often there are not easy answers; so we released the call early hoping that people would respond before (or after) the session. I’ve yet to respond to it myself so I’m going to attempt to do that in this post.

As college students click, swipe and tap through their daily lives—both in the classroom and outside of it—they’re creating a digital footprint of how they think, learn and behave that boggles the mind.

“We’re standing under a waterfall, feasting on information that’s never existed before,” said Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist and associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “All of this data has the power to redefine higher education.”