Hello critical data world!

My name is Carlos. I am originally from Colombia, but I have been living in Belgium for the past three years. Before starting my graduate studies, I was a teacher in rural schools in my Country, where I developed an increased interest in education as a field and, more specifically, on topics regarding educational equity.

Currently, I am a doctoral student at the K.U. Leuven and at the University of Edinburgh, where I developed an interest in digital education. I chose to take this course because it is strongly related to my current research on edtech brokers (intermediary organizations between schools and edtech providers, increasingly prominent after the covid crisis).

By the end of this course, I hope to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of data practices in education. That is, I aim to understand better what are their main threats (for instance enhancing inequality or increasing surveillance) and possibilities, especially regarding the aforementioned topic of educational equity.

Beyond any functional outcomes that this course can give me, I just found the topic of big data and its derivates very interesting, since I believe it affects all areas of our life and determines in new ways our agency both as individuals and as societies.

Lastly, I am really looking forward to the data visualization exercises, as they will give us an opportunity to study data production in action. I think it will be lots of fun to make and see all the visualizations throughout the semester.