Digital Trace Audit: A #clmooc New Year’s ‘Unmake’ Cycle

Want to join me in a #clmooc ‘unmake’ cycle?

(clmooc stands for Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the tracks, traces, and trails we leave as we work digitally and online. In a recent chapter focused on learning analytics and writing, I wrote about some of the potentials and pitfalls in education of the traces we leave when we write digitally. It begins:

Though the electronic pulses that transmit data packets across the Atlantic in milliseconds can make digital writing seem ephemeral, writers composing with digital devices and within digitally networked environments leave traces. Through new media’s social practices and algorithmic designs, these traces can be fed back and used, making them long lasting, seemingly indelible marks.

User metrics and analytics—though still early emerging socio-technological phenomena—have quickly become foregrounded in big business, policing, and governmental decision-making. At the same time, they have also become backgrounded in social life—an everyday, “unseen” aspect of the social ecologies of daily life. (Smith, Cope & Kalantzis, 2017, p. 235)

In addition to privacy, security, energy costs, etc., one of the pitfalls that this hints at is how our data traces are used as a commodity. What’s the saying? “If it’s a free app, you are the cost.” And yet, in order to realize some of the potentials with online writing and creating tools, we have to agree to terms of service that are written in such broad and inclusive language that we don’t really have the choice but to, in essence, sell our digital souls. I don’t know how many of those ‘Agree’ checkboxes I’ve ticked without reading, but even if I read, if I wanted to use an app or participate in online communities, I wouldn’t really have that much of a choice but to tick, tick, tick.

So, when Wendy posted a tweet about a Digital Detox, it definitely caught my eye.

Anyone feeling a little digi-full? Try a data detox https://t.co/QkMDFOG6lG #edtech #data

— Wendy Taleo (@wentale) December 7, 2017

So, here’s my idea for a New Year’s #clmooc UnMake Cycle…

For the month of January, I have made a grid with several ways to check in on our digital traces that I have been collecting the last month or so. You can randomly pick one each day or week, or you can work your way through them sequentially.

The reason this is an ‘unmake’ cycle is that we might choose to delete accounts, erase images, edit profile descriptions, clear browser histories, or otherwise ‘unmake’ our digital traces along the way. Let us know what you’re up to on the usual #clmooc channels.

However, there can be plenty of making opportunities as well!

We might check out a new app to replace an older one that isn’t functioning, and post something we create with it.
We might remix the terms of service of our favorite platforms as a way to actually, finally read those darn things.
We might make a network map of our personal learning network, including the digital platforms and tools that serve as the gatekeepers to the folks and ideas with whom we want to connect.