Platform literacy - an essential future skill

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The internet is increasingly becoming an arena for surveillance and unauthorised exploitation of users' personal data. We need to raise our awareness of what our favourite platforms and apps are doing with our data and develop strategies to limit the damage. This will mean spreading our risks by using a patchwork of different platforms so that no one platform completely "owns" us. Some really useful platforms and tools will have to be ditched and replaced by something less cool but much safer. Security and integrity must come before convenience and coolness. This discussion has to be tackled in education, both in schools and universities.

This is the theme of a series of articles by Bryan Alexander on EdSurge, Follow Along With a Grad Seminar About Edtech. He describes a course he's running that gets students to discuss and investigate the pros and cons of digital technology in both society and education. Part five of the series interested me the most, Students Size Up Edtech’s Dark Side, focusing on the key problems we face today in terms of digitalisation. They identified three main areas of concern:

• Tech addiction - social media and gaming are designed to keep us hooked.
• Digital divides - inequalities in internet access, devices, support, digital literacy etc.
• Privacy and digital "colonialism" - exploitation of personal data, provoking outrage as a business model, largely western and white corporations dominating the global digital space.

There are no simple answers here, not even complex answers, but we all need to become more aware of what is going on and be able to make mature decisions about which technologies, platforms and tools we should embrace and which we should steer clear of. For educators, it's about striking a balance.

The students hope to infuse an awareness of these issues into their professional practice, driving them to seek to address them through their thoughtful and creative work. Ultimately we remained committed to exploring technology in education—but with a more balanced attitude, greater concerns and a deeper awareness of edtech’s social dimension.

As a footnote to this I have recently installed a privacy app called Jumbo on my mobile devices that alerts me to possible vulnerability in Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. Seems to do the job so far but if anyone knows better please share your thoughts.