New educational content for the data society
The open data policies are useful in the context of a society that knows how to extract value from data. The educational system must take a leading role. We propose two types of issues:
- Include, in child educational programs, content aimed at all citizens understand the information constructed from data, especially numerical data, tables and graphs.
- Teach how to use data from specialties (vocational training and university). For example, application development from data, data visualization, data journalism ...
The goals are:
- Improving citizens' ability to understand information and contribute to society of the data
- Increase the number of re-users and extract greater value to open data
Group audience:
Comments
That's very important. One
That's very important. One initiative I love is http://youngrewiredstate.org/ . Plus I have this long standing idea that civic data hacking should be taught in schools, merging civic education and computer classes.
Any other inspiring example?
I have heard that in Zaragoza
I have heard that in Zaragoza Town they are developing some kind of educational program on data. I have to ask for more information.
The OKF talking about school of data: http://blog.okfn.org/2012/02/08/announcing-the-school-of-data/
I completely agree with this
As Dschola Association (www.dschola.it) we're trying some different way of teaching computer science in Italian secondary school: so we promoted the Italian Scratch Festival for videogames developed by young students, and tomorrow we'll start a working group for introducing "open data" concepts ... please if you have any other examples or curricula let us know.
Training and sensitizing
Training and sensitizing on data usage is very important. US's data.gov is making an effort to make all-range students aware of PSI reuse, proposing changes in school's curriculum and spreading tools (http://www.data.gov/story/datagov-in-the-classroom). In my opinion, the most important goal is making society feel comfortable 'playing' with data.
Great! That's the way. In
Great! That's the way. In Spain we urgently need to raise the number of people who knows how to reuse data. The first step is to make students aware of the use of public data.
I strongly this believe in
I strongly this believe in this idea. It is very important to train people how to make better decisions based on data, and not just based on opinions.
Thanks Alberto.
Thanks Alberto.
As you known, I think it's very important bring data to education area, it will be good for data sector and, also, for education quality.
I know several examples in this effort, some of them are mentioned in comments of this post. I want to add two interesting examples:
Australian schools use Government data to teach data analysis skills: http://www.spacetimeresearch.com/esa-datagenie.html
In Canada they are challenging the traditional comparative reports of school performance. Now parents have direct information from the government, and can reach a conclusion about which school is the most satisfactory to their interests without having to adhere only to the reports of those institutions. For more information: http://governingpeople.com/davideaves/16908/challenge-open-data-and-metrics
Carrying on with our line of
Carrying on with our line of work based on a campaign to raise public awarenes and education about public data access by Zaragoza City Council, we are working on the initiative called "I know and I improve my neighbourhood". The main goal is to promote citizen who demand quality and open format data of public administrations, and also companies. I attached a link to the document that includes the main ideas and objectives of this project.
http://www.zaragoza.es/contenidos/risp/Propuesta_reutilizadores_bibliote...