Humans have become increasingly datafied with the use of digital technologies that generate information with and about their bodies and everyday lives. The onto-epistemological dimensions of human–...

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How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data:

Society is become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills.

https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/download/3275/4298

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

People’s encounters and entanglements with the personal digital data that they generate is a new and compelling area of research interest in this age of the ascendancy of digital data. Masses of pe...

Feeling your data: touch and making sense of personal digital data

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co-designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity.

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The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness.

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Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important.  This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities.  This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers.

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Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

- Reflective writing is vital in learning professional skills and particularly in Computer Science (CS). However, there appears to be a lack of literature relating to a reliable of the current reflective writing frameworks used for CS education. This paper describes a novel Reflective Writing Framework (RWF) that has been applied to the manual content analysis of CS students’ reflective writings. The paper aims to empirically examine this RWF in terms of reflection indicators and levels that can be manually assessed by raters. The results of this manual content analysis showed empirically that the coding scheme of the RWF is valid and reliable. The results were that the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of the overall coding scheme of the RWF increased from 0.5 to 0.8 in pilot tests and ranged between 0.40 and 0.75 in terms reflection indicators and levels; substantially, this means ranged from moderate to substantial agreement. This research contributes to CS education an RWF that can be reliably annotated and was validated by CS experts.

Jose J. Cavero Montaner

Papers

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

Open Research Online