Entry 9: Data Literacy as a Professional Obligation

Date: June 5, 2025
Quotation: “Big data provides many exciting opportunities… to develop new tools to address [educational] problems” (Ben-Porath & Ben Shahar, 2017, p. 243).
Reference:
Ben-Porath, S., & Ben Shahar, T. H. (2017). Introduction: Big data and education: ethical and moral challenges. Theory and Research in Education, 15(3), 243–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878517737201

Why I Included This:
This quote shifted my thinking from viewing big data as a threat to recognizing it as a professional responsibility. As I develop as an educator, I need to understand how educational data is gathered, analyzed, and interpreted and how to challenge its use when it lacks context or empathy.

This entry connects directly to Entry 7’s reflections on Avenue and the limits of digital records. Since then, I’ve explored what kinds of learning data we collect in our platform and started critically evaluating it with students. We now reflect together on which activities help them learn most effectively and which kinds of feedback are useful or overwhelming.

In doing so, I’ve realized that data literacy should be part of learner empowerment. Students need to be taught how to read their own data not just receive it. This also revisits Entry 3’s concern about how adaptive tech might mislabel or mislead learners.

What’s changed for me is my relationship with data: from passive consumer to active interpreter. I now include short reflective surveys after units and track patterns in student feedback. It’s helped me become more responsive and transparent. This entry solidifies that big data is only as valuable as the questions we ask of it 3and the conversations it opens.