from Diigo http://ift.tt/2loZnPJ
via IFTTT
I posted a link to the complete Pew Research Report (Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age) a few weeks back (March 11). This week, while thinking about my final assignment for Education and Digital Cultures, I returned to Theme 7: The need grows for algorithmic literacy, transparency and oversight.
While the respondents make a great deal of both interesting and important points about concerns that need to be addressed at a societal level – for example, managing accountability (or the dissolution thereof) and transparency of algorithms, avoiding centralized execution of bureaucratic reason/including checks and balances within the centralization enabled by algorithms – there were also points raised that need to be addressed at an educational level. Specifically, Justin Reich from MIT Teaching Systems Lab suggests that ‘those who design algorithms should be trained in ethics’, and Glen Ricart argues that there is a need for people to understand how algorithms affect them and for people to be able to personalize the algorithms they use. In the longer term, Reich’s point doesn’t seem to be limited to those studying computer science subjects, in that, if, as predicted elsewhere (theme 1) in the same report, algorithms continue to spread, more individuals will presumably be involved in their creation as a routine part of their profession (rather than their creation being reserved for computer scientists/programmers/etc.). Also, as computer science is ‘rolled out’ in primary and secondary schools, it makes sense that the study of (related) ethics ought to be a part of the curriculum at those levels also. Further, Ricart implies, in the first instance, that algorithmic literacy needs to be integrated into more general literacy/digital literacy instruction, and in the second, that all students will need to develop computational thinking and the ability to modify algorithms through code (unless black-boxed tool kits are provided to enable people to do this without coding per se, in the same way the Weebly enables people to build websites without writing code).