In an exclusive interview with Edarabia, Joel Adams, Curriculum Manager at the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB), talks about the latest curriculum update and how it can help students understand common policies and dilemmas in today’s digital society.
Can you tell us more about IB’s latest curriculum update – the digital society course?
Every Diploma Programme (DP) course offered by the International Baccalaureate (IB) enjoys scheduled, sustained, and evidence-based curriculum reviews on a multi-year cycle. Just over two years ago this process began for the current “Information technology in a global society” (ITGS) course. ITGS was first created during the 1990s as an innovative approach to learning and teaching linked to the earlier information and internet revolutions of that era. Over the ensuing two decades, however, ITGS became dated and inflexible for teachers and students.
Our remit in the development of the new digital society course was to build on the very best aspects of this prior course – including its focus on social and ethical implications and impacts of digital technologies and media – while updating it for an age defined by AI, algorithmic culture, automation, and near ubiquitous computing and digitisation.
At the heart of the digital society course is an open invitation to our students and teachers to participate as partners in inquiry as they explore this world together.
In place of static, one size fits all prescribed content, the new course encourages students and teachers to dive into the exciting digital world around us supported by powerful learning, teaching and research tools and frameworks within the humanities and social sciences. We believe that honing important skills, habits, and attitudes for digital life-long learners is far more important – and timely – than repeating and reproducing static facts and knowledge that will be out-of-date by the time the course debuts.
Most importantly, this is also a course that acknowledges and values the unique and distinct contexts of our teachers and students. Digital society does not mean the same thing to different and diverse populations and the course welcomes and invites a discussion about these differences, divides, and perspectives. Our team is made up of educators, experts, academics, journalists, students, teachers and curriculum designers from around the world. The best discussions in our meetings have come from bringing together this diverse dream team and it has led to a course focused on the everyday needs and lives of classroom educators and students.
The next course is founded on conceptual understanding, rooted in the perspectives of contemporary social sciences and humanities, explored through inquiry and project-based learning and assessed by rigorous authentic tasks that empower young people to explore real-world issues; while developing transferable skills and confidence in expressing themselves through multiple modes and media.
The course is organised around a core set of “big ideas” offering multiple pathways to explore and practically experiment with digital technologies and media. These “big ideas” include disruption, systems, identities, agency and sustainability. They are all also proudly and happily “human first” – meaning each of our core “big ideas” begins and ends with the consideration of the needs, lives and experiences of real people and their communities.
This is not a course that values decontextualised knowledge of any one distinct or discrete technology, device, app or piece of software. Rather, the course is designed to help us position and investigate our increasingly use and reliance on digital technologies, devices, apps and media within actual real-world human contexts and situations to better understand where we are now and where we might go next.
How can obtaining knowledge of ethical frameworks help with students’ understanding of the impact of real-world digital policies and dilemmas?
Looking around us, we find a barrage of articles and reports on the challenges of living in a digital society. Everything from the latest misstep by a globally dominant digital platform to the daily diet of algorithmically distributed fake news, highlight the importance for young people to hone their skills in robust ethical reasoning and analysis.
On a fundamental level, the study and practice of ethics comes down to how we might best live and act both individually and collectively. How do we mitigate harm to the communities and world around us? How do we live and work with meaning and purpose in ways that respect the rights, responsibilities and dignity of others?
These have always been central questions at the heart of what it means to be human – and in a digital society they are more important than ever. But digital society also introduces new complex and complicated challenges to consider as well.
As the team developed the key outlines for the upcoming course, we kept returning to these challenges, asking ourselves: how do we prepare young people to live, lead and thrive in a digital age? How can we help them navigate the now?
Contemporary ethicists, digital sociologists and AI researchers do not always agree, but there does seem to be consensus that this new era is marked by some of the following:
These are not (or not only) “tech” issues – these are also profound ethical and policy dilemmas. This is very similar to what one prominent digital ethicist calls:
[T]he messy area of our ordinary lives where ethical issues are entangled with digital mass media, communication artifacts, information technologies of all sorts, computational processes [and] computer-mediated social interactions.
Ethical reasoning, analysis and decision-making are vitally important in a digital society. In the upcoming course, a central “values” unit introduces several prominent ethical perspectives and approaches that help support teachers and students as they unpack important digital dilemmas and debates encountered in a variety of contexts.
Practical engagement with a wide range of ethical frameworks is central to the upcoming course. These diverse perspectives enrich our understanding of digital dilemmas and challenges by bringing more voices to the table. In place of a monologue about expected or imagined costs and benefits, the next course encourages a dialogue about the important roles and real-world impacts that digital systems, technologies and media have in our lives. In a digital world, there are no easy to solve problems or scenarios where one analysis or set of recommendations will do. Digital ethical analysis must be mindful of diverse global contexts, approaches and ways of thinking and living.
These ethical investigations are not only about uncovering real-world impacts after they happen, but equally invested in understanding, evaluating and exploring the values that are embedded in the very design of the digital technologies and media that we use.
Linked to the course’s ethical investigations is the significant related area of policy and governance. Who makes the rules for a digital society? How are these rules enforced? And, significantly, how might we imagine and a create a digital society that is more just, free and equitable?
Again, the goal being that we work together to prepare young people to live, lead and thrive in a digital age marked and defined by constant change, disruption and complexity.
Can you explain the concept of ‘digital interventions’? How are these helpful in addressing global challenges, as highlighted by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals?
A helpful way to explain the idea of “digital interventions” is by way of a week-long activity I participated in a few years ago with my film and media students. Called “bored and brilliant,” the aim of the project was to raise awareness of our shared (and increasing) daily dependence on mobile digital devices. (Here’s the original podcast episode with my students: and here’s the resulting book)
What does unbroken instant access to an overwhelming amount of data and information paired with near constant connection to other people do to us? How does it change the way we think and behave? Our daily rhythms and interactions with real people in the real world?
Each day of the project began with a new prompt to make a change in our personal attention economy. On the first day we were asked to keep our smart phone in our pocket for a few hours. The second day, we were challenged to go a full day without taking a digital photo or selfie. By the end of the week we were deleting apps and signing out of our social networks. Not forever, but just for a day or two. At the end of the project, my students and I shared a new understanding of exactly how pervasive and invasive life with our digital devices had become.
I like to think of these daily prompts as different forms of a “digital intervention.” Interventions are small, defined, specific and often measurable steps that make some form of positive change in the digital world.
This digital world is full of big, thorny, complex and complicated problems and challenges. From hunger and poverty to climate change, clean energy and quality education (to name just a few of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)) – it can be extremely difficult and overwhelming to begin to think about how we might make a difference in the world.
Rather than be paralysed by these challenges, the upcoming course encourages students and teachers to start small by imagining possible interventions in the immediate contexts around them. We use the term “digital interventions” rather than solutions because they are just that – again: defined, specific and often measurable steps that make some form of positive change.
A digital solution implies that we can somehow definitively address issues like inequality, peace and well-being through the newest app or next online platform, but we know this just is not true. Some experts and commenters have even begun to call this mindset “technological solutionism.
What we can do, however, is leverage many of the most tried and test tools of the social sciences and humanities to examine, evaluate and investigate some real-world versions of these big challenges in order to collaborate with others on different ideas, approaches and ways of mitigating the problem as we find it.Hence, “digital interventions”.
A digital intervention could be anything from designing an interactive meal-sharing app to address food deserts (SDG #2: zero hunger) to proposing a revised school BYOD (“bring your own device”) policy to help address student access to reliable internet networks (SDG #4: quality education). Digital interventions, together with something like the SDGs, offer our students and teachers a frame of reference for imagining and designing positive change in digital society.
In your opinion, why is digital literacy important for students?
Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, has a great quote in his recent book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future. He says that in a digital society full of complexity and uncertainty what we need (and what our students require) are less maps and more compasses.
For Ito, a map implies pre-defined, unchanging knowledge of the terrain around us as well as the existence of a single best route or pathway. But in a world and workforce that is constantly changing, stable maps no longer apply. The compass, on the other hand, “is a far more flexible tool that requires the user to employ creativity and autonomy in discovering his or her own path.”
From the smart devices in our pockets to the endless streams on popular social media networks, we are now linked with one another and to all prior human data, information and knowledge in countless convergent ways.
This situation has profound implications for our students.
If the digital age is about interactions and systems rather than static, stable objects and “things,” we must ensure that this is how we learn, teach and assess with them. In this new digital world, it no longer suffices for students to passively study pre-established unchanging content to be rotely recalled or evidenced in archaic analogue formats. This isn’t education for a digital age, but a series of lost opportunities.
I can think of no better way of understanding digital literacy than as a set of overlapping professional and educational competencies that empower our students to forge their own way through this data-immersed and media-rich landscape.
This means teaching and learning that is flexible, adaptable and personalised for our students – energized by their unique passions, interests and experiences. It also means teaching and learning that broadens and enriches conventional notions of student outcomes and skills.
By the end of the two-year digital society course, the aim is for students to emerge with the skills, confidence and attitudes that guide them as:
So digital literacy as a compass rather than a map. As Ito also observes:
The decision to forfeit the map in favour of the compass recognizes that in an increasingly unpredictable world moving ever more quickly, a detailed map may lead you deep into the woods at an unnecessarily high cost.
But, a good compass will always take you where you need to go.
What are your thoughts on automation and the future of employment for graduates?
Without a doubt we are living through the beginnings of a powerful and permanent realignment to traditional markets in the face of automation and just-in-time, project-oriented, gig and sharing economies. These changes will require a workforce that is more flexible and mobile as well as one where discrete skills and knowledge are valued less than adaptability, self-direction and ongoing learning. At the same time, we are witnessing the merging of formal and informal spaces brought together by new tools and ways of collaborating and communication that bridge the worlds of work and personal life.
Not all these changes are welcome – but they are coming. We have an educational duty to prepare our young people to live and succeed in this emerging world, but perhaps more importantly an opportunity to help them shape and lead it as well.
One of the most exciting aspects of developing the digital society course over the past few years has been watching as others around the world caught up to our conversation. At the IB we have been foregrounding the value of conceptually rich, holistic, creative and collaborative approaches to education for going on fifty years. Different educational fads and fashions come and go, but the IB steadfastly supports teacher and student inquiry, context-specific flexibility and authentic coursework-based assessments.
The digital society course exemplifies this IB philosophy as well as the key attributes of (what we call) the IB Learner Profile, including that are student strive to be reflective, open-minded, balanced and internationally-minded communicators, thinkers and risk-takers. These are precisely the attributes most needed in the transitioning world of automation sketched above.
Joel Adams is a Curriculum Manager at the International Baccalaureate Organization, headquartered in The Hague.
His research explores global visual and digital cultures. After completing a doctorate in critical theory, he conducted post-doc work in information sciences. For about ten years he worked with young people in inner city urban schools in the US teaching critical thinking, literature, film and media. With the IB, he helped design a new film and filmmaking curriculum for secondary students and is now re-designing their visual arts course and creating a social science and humanities course called ‘Digital Society’.
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