Online CPD Course for Adult Educators: Using Technology with Under- Represented Adults

Description

I wrote and delivered Unit 6: Future and Emerging Technologies We are surrounded by ‘things’ that sense, collect, analyse and represent data drawn passively from our lives. Unbroken surveillance, or monitoring, has been cast as the defining dynamic of contemporary society. This relies on a power imbalance; one that places the most data-rich organisations in unprecedented positions of influence, within all spheres of life, and casts those already marginalised as further at risk of exploitation. Adult education often casts the boundaries between ‘learning’ and everyday life as less distinct. The most effective adult learning makes use of what we know, and how we live, to contextualise our understanding of technology...and to make it relevant. Equally, those who are marginalised, within society and economy, are increasingly forced to make use of digital systems and services. The danger, however, is that such interactions are not fully understood, and the associated costs and harms are not always fully surfaced or explored. The presence of new and emerging sensing technologies, within both public and previously private domains, has come to disrupt informational contexts and allow for non-consensual capture of data. For example, the development of voice activated devices has stimulated privacy concerns within the media, such as user consent, but are now being used to deliver digital inclusion (Aylesbury City Council). This unit asks; • Are we agreeing to things we don’t really understand? • What rights do we have that protect us from intrusion? • What are the issues and risks we face as we employ these new technologies? and finally…given all of this…we ask, • Where next for data/information literacy? 2.0 Aims This unit aims to ask practitioners to consider some of the core challenges, to learning, arising from the new class of emerging and future systems 1. To raise awareness of the nature of new and emerging technologies 2. To consider the implications of new technologies upon learners 3. To communicate the new subject rights emerging from EU Data Protection Regulation 4. To begin consideration of what these changes mean for adult information literacy

Period	16 Nov 2017
Event type	Course