What are the opportunities and the challenges offered by emerging modes of technologically-inflected communication and decision-making? What is our role and responsibility as educators and as developers of research and teaching digital infrastructures? What do students need in the 21st century? As education institutions and providers struggle to respond to the first two questions, are we abrogating our responsibility to the last? In this talk, Matt Ratto will describe some of the opportunities and the challenges we currently face, laying out a model of action for how to potentially address the questions raised above. Core to his thinking are two related points; first that we must help students develop a greater sense of how the informational world and its attendant infrastructures helps shape how and what we think, and second, that a good way to do this is to give students the space to engage in reflexive acts of technological production – what Matt has termed ‘critical making.’ He will provide concrete examples from both his research and his teaching that demonstrate the value and importance of reflexive, hands-on work with digital technologies in helping students develop the critical digital literacy skills they need to function in today’s society. Matt Ratto is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and directs the Semaphore Research cluster on Inclusive Design, Mobile and Pervasive Computing and, as part of Semaphore, the Critical Making lab.

1. Technology, Education,
Democracy
Cybera 2016
October 28, 2016
Matt Ratto
Associate Professor
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto
matt.ratto@utoronto.ca

2. Q
What are the opportunities and the challenges offered by
emerging modes of technologically-mediated communication
and decision-making?

3. Q
What is our role and responsibility as educators and as
developers of research and teaching digital infrastructures?

4. Q
What do citizens need in the 21st
century?

5. A
Literacy: same but different

6. ...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should
not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.
--Thomas Jefferson

7. it is of the paramount importance that the means of general
information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of
persons be induced to read and understand questions going down to
the very foundations of social order...
Report to the Trustees, Boston Public Library, 1852

11. Infrastructural Literacy

12. infrastructure as "pervasive enabling
resources in network form"
--Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David
Ribes, Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in
a Networked Environment

13. A
we must help citizens develop a greater sense of how the
informational world and its attendant infrastructures helps shape
how and what we think

14. Big Data

15. Why is this about
Democracy?

17. Algorithmic
manipulation

20. Brittle and opaque
systems

22. Potentially systematic
bias

24. critical making

26. The approach
• active engagements with the technological rather than passive use
of technologies as 'tools'
• inquiry that adresses role and scope of technology in modern
society
• linking of technical activities and social critique to enrichen both

28. Activity:
-Hack CHI, engage with issues of big data, privacy, and surveillance.
-Design and Deploy

30. Quantitative Toilet

35. Outcomes

42. Outcomes
• Diversity of responses
• Processes for creating 'legitimate' technical interventions
• What will people 'trade'

43. “Makes Sense to Me!”:
Participatory Sensing,
Information Visualization,
and 3D Representation
iConference 2016,
--Gabby Resch, Daniel Southwick, Matt Ratto Yanni Loukissas

44. Goals:
• raise awareness of a data and civics;
• critically interrogate big data claims;
• develop dialogue around sensing and information visualization.

45. Activity:
-construct and deploy wireless body worn sensors;
-produce multiple visualizations and physical representations;
-explore the technical, social, and semantic challenges involved with
collecting, interpreting, and disseminating personal data.

51. Outcomes
• Highlight the subjective choices and work of 'sensing' and data
wrangling
• Revealing the norms of data practice and visualization
(generalizability, objective views)
• Begin to posit and produce alternatives

52. Inhabiting the Topo-
Datagraphical Network
Toronto School: Then, Now, Next
2016
Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, Matt Ratto

53. Activity:
-Built an interactive immersive experience
-change the scale by placing users directly within the geospatial
landscapes of datasets

57. Outcomes
-Affective responses to data
-Discovery of small variations (valleys) as important as large (peaks)
-Dynamic engagement with 'messiness' of data

58. What are the opportunities and the challenges offered by
emerging modes of technologically-mediated communication
and decision-making?
What is our role and responsibility as educators and as
developers of research and teaching digital infrastructures?
What do citizens need in the 21st
century?

59. Infrastructural literacy requires
approaches that blend social
analysis and technical work
How to support?

60. Can an intelligent house fall in love with the house next door? Can they
have baby houses? Is an architect a trained "womb" for houses, or
more crudely, is an architect how a house makes another house? Does
an architect feel like she/he is violating fundamental forces of
evolution if she/he does not include the latest new technology in the
house she/he next gives birth to? Do you believe in progress? Is the
house that Donald Trump lives in better than the house you live in?
--Rich Gold (1994) How smart does the bed in your house have to be
before you are afraid to go to sleep at night?

62. @mattratto