Summaries & Analysis: Information Privacy in Education
In Understanding and Maintaining Your Privacy When Writing with Digital Technologies, Lindsey C. Kim stresses the importance of information privacy in digital environments. Her explanation is rooted in three main ideas: 1) data is the information one leaves behind when interacting with digital spaces, 2) agency is one’s ability to influence what happens around you, and 3) flow is how our information moves and where it goes. Kim further discusses the necessity for students to understand these concepts, so as to gain more control over their information privacy online. She explains the extent to which the Web possesses and uses our data to its advantage, and how we all “unintentionally or unknowingly create informational traces.”
Similarly, in Messy & Chaotic Learning: A Domains Presentation and Keene State College, Martha Fay Burtis also explores the complexities, advantages, and dangers of the Web, by providing a brief history of its utilization within higher education. He writes that the introduction of technology and the Learning Management System (LMS) led to a loss of control over the classroom, leading teachers to abdicate their responsibilities in higher education to the Web. Burtis uses an academic project, in which students used Domain of One’s Own to create their websites, as an example of how and why students should learn about and use the Web.
My Opinion
Both Kim and Burtis pose strong arguments in the understanding and usefulness of the Web within classrooms. While they each wrote of different aspects, it seems they would agree that teachers and students alike should understand how to obtain more control over the way we utilize the Web, especially in an academic setting. Personally, I appreciate that both Kim and Burtis are not entirely against the use of technology in the classroom, but rather they recognize the necessity to learn more as times change.
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