This algorithmic literacy workshop puts a new spin on media literacy by moving beyond fake news to examine the algorithms that shape our online experiences and how we encounter information in our everyday lives.

The Penn State Berks Privacy Workshop Series focuses on privacy issues for students in the past, present, and future.  The Privacy Workshop spotlights privacy practices and concerns in the current moment; Digital Leadership explores future implications of past and current digital behaviors; Digital Shred provides tools to evaluate and mitigate the damage of past digital behaviors; and Digital Wellness focuses on privacy across the lifespan - bringing together the past, present, & future by finding a balance of technology & wellness, while aligning habits and goals.  Each workshop is grounded in theory – countering approaches that overpromise user control in the face of information asymmetries and the control paradox – and embrace students’ autonomy and agency by avoiding prescribed solutions, and instead encouraging decision-making frameworks.

The Penn State Berks Privacy Workshop Series focuses on privacy issues for students in the past, present, and future.  The Privacy Workshop spotlights privacy practices and concerns in the current moment; Digital Leadership explores future implications of past and current digital behaviors; Digital Shred provides tools to evaluate and mitigate the damage of past digital behaviors; and Digital Wellness focuses on privacy across the lifespan - bringing together the past, present, & future by finding a balance of technology & wellness, while aligning habits and goals.  Each workshop is grounded in theory – countering approaches that overpromise user control in the face of information asymmetries and the control paradox – and embrace students’ autonomy and agency by avoiding prescribed solutions, and instead encouraging decision-making frameworks.

This workshop delivers an action-oriented introduction to personal data privacy designed for new college students. The session is designed to reveal the systems in place to collect and analyze online behavioral data, and to unveil the real-world consequences of online profiling in contexts like sentiment shaping, consumer preferences, employment, healthcare, personal finance, and law enforcement. In lieu of a prescriptive approach, students analyze case studies to observe how online behaviors impact real-world opportunities and reflect on the benefits and risks of technology use to develop purposeful online behaviors and habits that align with their individual values. Developing knowledge practices regarding privacy and the commodification of personal information and embodying the core library values of privacy and intellectual freedom, the workshop promotes a proactive rather than reactive approach and presents a spectrum of privacy preferences across a range of contexts in order to respect students’ autonomy and agency in personal technology use.

This assignment requires students to apply their knowledge of antisemitic tropes to tweets with the final outcome of the assignment being a short analytical paper and a presentation.

For this assignment, students will spend time as a critical media observer - namely, their own uses of media in a 72 hour period. In order to complete the assignment, students MUST record each time they use/engage with media for a complete 72 hour (3 day) period in a LOG, recording their exposure to, uses of, and interaction with mediated communication (e.g., cell phone, social media, TV, radio, etc.) During this time, students are also required to make detailed autoethnographic “field” notes of their experience and how they were personally (socially, culturally) effected by the media- what interfaces/platforms/sources they interacted with, which were intentional and which were not, the effects (if any) on their mood, time management, body, further use of media, etc. After the 72 hours, students write a 2-3 page self-reflexive paper that responds to the prompts (see handout)

Students will be expected to find evidence to investigate a pseudoscientific claim or conspiracy theory. For their graded assignment, they will be submitting a two-page paper to their Chemistry professor (the lead professor for this class in which I’m embedding). In their paper, they make a case that either supports the claim or rejects it. They will be expected to use both library and credible online sources for support.