Digital Information - Lesson 12: Digital Information Dilemmas Part 2

Overview

In this lesson students finish designing an artifact that represents their analysis of an article on the impacts of digitizing information. Students will complete the final two quadrants of their poster in which they identify the benefits and harms highlighted in the article and then make an overall claim about whether the world has been made better or worse through the digitization of information. At the conclusion of the class students update the position of their stickies on the "better" to "worse" spectrum they designed yesterday and then discuss whether and why they changed their opinion.

Goals

Students will be able to:

• Argue whether the digitization of information has broadly speaking improved or damaged society
• Examine articles to identify the social benefits and harms caused by information digitization

Purpose

This lesson is a continuation of the major unit project. Students continue to consider broad societal questions about the impacts of computing and the ways it is changing their world.

Resources

Additional Code.org material

For the students

• Project Rubric

Getting Started (5 minutes)

Remarks

• Yesterday you began making a position poster based on an article you read. Today we are going to finish that up before debating our positions!

Activity (50 mins)

Position Posters (15 minutes)

Do This: Use the lesson slides to guide students through completing their position posters.

Do This: Complete quadrants 3 & 4.

• Quadrant 3: What are the benefits and harms of digitizing this content?
• Quadrant 4: Is our world better or worse because of digital representation? Explain why, giving examples from the article.

Jigsaw (10 minutes)

Group: Place students in groups with one representative for each article.

Discuss: Students share their position papers and discuss the articles they read with their groups.

Digital Dilemma Debate (10 minutes)

• In the last class, we started the lesson by placing a sticky note on a spectrum. Based on your jigsaw discussions, put a sticky note back on the board. Has your position changed since yesterday?
• Where do you stand?

Do This: Students move their sticky notes along the spectrum of worse to better.

Remarks

• Now, where does our class stand? Where do the majority of our sticky notes fall on the spectrum? Let's consider our group position.

Debate: Is our world better or worse because of digital representation?

Do This: Conclude the debate by grouping all sticky notes into a single location on the spectrum to represent the majority position of the class.

Wrap up (5 Minutes)

• There are trade-offs in representing information digitally. Usually someone is benefitting while others are harmed.

Prompt: Why should we care about information being represented digitally? How does this impact you personally?

Assessment: Submit

Students turn in both of the pieces of their project for assessment:

• Annotated article
• Position Projects

Standards Alignment

• CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards (2017): IC - Impacts of Computing: 2-IC-20 - Compare tradeoffs associated with computing technologies that affect people's everyday activities and career options, 3A-IC-24 - Evaluate the ways computing impacts personal, ethical, social, economic, and cultural practices, 3A-IC-28 - Explain the beneficial and harmful effects that intellectual property laws can have on innovation.

End of Lesson

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