Supporting the development of critical data literacies in higher education: building blocks for fair data cultures in society

Abstract

In the last ten years digitalized data have permeated our lives in a massive way. Beyond the internet ubiquity and cultural change outlined in what Castells (1996) called the network society, we are now witnessing a datafied society, where large amounts of digital data¿the DNA of information¿are driving new social practices. The most enthusiastic discourses on this abundance of data have emphasized the opportunity to generate new business models, with professional landscapes connected to data science and open practices in science and the public space (EMC Education Services 2015; Scott 2014). However, more recently, the rather naïve logic of data capture and its articulation through various algorithms as drivers of more economical and objective social practices have been the object of criticism and deconstruction (Kitchin 2014; Zuboff 2019). The university as an institution fell into this paradigm somehow abruptly, while striving to survive its crisis of credibility. The digitalization of processes and services was considered a form of innovation and laid the foundations for the later phenomenon of datafication (Williamson 2018).