Activity 5

Reflecting on personal geography, data ethics & social and cultural life

Mapping your personal geography over thematic maps with novel visualization tools raises new questions about how social and cultural practices relate to experiences in everyday life. In this activity, you will reflect on activities 1-4 to consider personal mobility and the changing aspects of social and cultural life. This page begins with a set of questions that can be used either as an assignment or to prompt discussion. Subsequently, this page shares an instructional video from two teachers who describe how they used the MaSelfS framework to support students to reflect on activities 1-4 from a data ethics perspective. This page concludes with quotes from students sharing what and how they learned after completing these activities.

Sample Reflection/Assignment Questions

The following questions can be given to students either as an assignment or as discussion prompts. For a sample assignment, see Activity 5 Sample Assignment

  1. Describe what it felt like to collect and be able to see and interact with your own personal mobility data?

  2. What can personal mobility data tell you about who you are?

  3. What are the different constraints that influence your mobility (e.g., what powers or authorities condition your mobility)?

  4. What places do you visit daily, where do you spend the most time, and what is the nature of your learning in those places?

  5. How do places and people you interact with along your daily or weekly “round” create a distinctive personal geography (e.g., your identity in relation to society)?

  6. How do technologies that collect and use personal data about you work (e.g., advertising recommendation systems)?

  7. Who has the power to design and develop these technologies? Do you have any control over your own data?

  8. Finally, to what extent are you your data?

Reflection: Teacher Perspectives

In this video, Cody O’Donnell and Amanda Meng describe how teachers and students can reflect on Activities 1-4 from a data ethics perspective.

 

Reflection: Student Perspectives 

The quotes below illustrate different student reflections as a result of completing activities 1-4:

“Gathering and reflecting on my location data in class was something I experienced for the first time. Even though my location data is publicly available through applications like google maps, facebook, weather channel and many many more; it was the first time that I got to talk about it and reflect on it face to face with other people.”

“Gathering data about myself felt inconsequential at first as I already use countless technologies that rely on my sharing personal information daily. Once I was able to visualize my movements over that one day, however, I felt like these few numbers latitude and longitude pairs on a map revealed so much about me. I felt able to scrutinize my life in a very intimate, personal way.”

“Observing and interacting with my own data felt both empowering and unsettling. On one hand, seeing my own whereabouts and patterns across several days gave me knowledge of my daily habits. Seeing my movement data in front of me made me feel capable of planning out future days. I also felt the need to explore areas that I may otherwise avoid. At the same time, noticing the accuracy and speed at which my phone can track my location made me think deeply about the types and quantity of personal data we afford to technology companies [...] This feeling was spurred by my realization of the high level of detail that exists in the location data that my phone collects.”

“When asked to share our location data with the class, I opted out. At the time, this was very rational thinking. I live alone off campus. I’m a small female. I don’t want people to know where I live and when I’m home. After discussion, I realized this was a ridiculous line of thinking, as I rarely opt out of giving apps on my phone access to my location. Anyone who gained access to that data would know everything about my whereabouts. Pair that information with my social media presence, search history, and payment history and someone looking to do harm would have a comprehensive amount of information to do so. It is interesting that I was more concerned about 30 or so of my peers viewing my data but have ignored the many companies that have access to even more information than that. This exercise has made me rethink who has access to my data.”