Your new post is loading...
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.
