Pedalogica: educación y TIC

This blog was kindly contributed by Kirstie-Anne Woodman, a recent International Relations graduate from the University of Birmingham. Kirstie-Anne is currently interning at a diversity and inclusion consultancy agency, Worth of Mouth Services.You can find Kirstie-Anne on LinkedIn.

It took me a long time to find a dissertation topic which invigorated me and I felt a true passion for. Then, by chance, I came across Nicola Rollock’s ‘Staying Power’ paper, a report on the career experiences of Black female professors in the UK. While reading, it hit me, I had never had, or even seen a Black professor at my university – let alone a Black female professor. This led me to think of all of my university experiences which had differed to those of my peers due to my Blackness. I read reports regarding the Black attainment gap, the Black drop-out rate and the need to decolonise curriculums. For the first time, feelings of otherness that I had felt throughout my entire university journey, were explained and quantified in academic terms. And so I wrote ‘Black Academic, White Space: The Insidious Legacy of Institutional Racism at Top-tier UK Universities’.

OPINION: As a student in 2020, not everything's been bad. For one, lecturers were finally forced to move completely online.

Back in May, my university - like many Canadian institutions - announced we’d be going online for fall. It was the right decision: students, faculty, and staff have remained safe, in terms of the coronavirus. But as campuses across the continent and around the world have shifted to online learning, it’s become clear that institutions - and many of us who work within them - may be oblivious to a very different safety risk, one that’s amplified in recent months. 

The pandemic has fast-forwarded higher education’s entanglement in proprietary, datafied systems, but the sector has failed entirely to grapple with how data impacts what we do.

Sure, most of us know at some level that we are fish swimming in increasingly datafied waters. Our devices track our searches and our locations and even our casual offline conversations, pitching products we’ve just spoken of back to us on social platforms.