Professor Minna Huotilainen chaired the panel Data Science for Education: Trends & Challenges in the HiData kick off event of the Helsinki Centre for Data Science. The panel consisted of assistant professor Petri Ihantola, senior lecturer Ari Korhonen, docent Sari Ylinen, and post doctoral researcher Marianna Vivitsou.
Marianna Vivitsou wrote a blog post about the fruitful panel discussion. The full text can be read on Vivitsou’s blog.
In her blog Vivitsou reminds us that technology has already made its way into schools, and digital competences are increasingly being included in curricula. The complex ways in which digitalization has impacted individuals and society should be taken into consideration when planning next steps in teaching. Vivitsou sets the goals for data science related education at much higher than just teaching skills in coding or editing and handling data. She notes that we already know that teaching grammar and lexicon is not all that it takes to learn to use a language. Navigating in the digital world is a similar situation. In Vivitsou’s opinion, conceptualizing the issue through literacies, stories and identities would open new possibilities for research, education and competences.