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TEACHING WITH THE LIBRARY 2019 - Privacy & Information Ethics

TEACHING WITH THE LIBRARY 2019 - Privacy & Information Ethics promotional image

In an era of rampant data collection, what can be done to ensure your privacy when you choose to participate in online communities? What responsibilities do we have, as instructors and librarians, to protect our students' right to privacy and educate them about the ethical use of information?

Register to attend TEACHING WITH THE LIBRARY 2019 - Privacy & information Ethics on January 9, 2019 at the Main Library Learning Commons to explore these important questions together. If you have already registered to attend, thank you! We look forward to seeing you there.

Schedule of Events

10:00 AM – Registration and coffee, tea, and light snacks in Food for Thought

10:30 AM – Keynote

Balancing Engagement and Privacy: Building Ethical Online Communities”  

Esra’a Al Shafei, Shambaugh Auditorium

Keynote Description: In online communities, balancing engagement and privacy is an ethical challenge made even more complex in regions rife with censorship and other unique security challenges. Majal builds digital platforms to celebrate and protect diverse communities and amplify marginalized voices in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. In this talk, Majal founder Esra’a Al Shafei will present a case study on how her organization addresses the complex cultural and political contexts of their stakeholders, from migrant workers, to LGBTQ individuals, to those who use music as a tool for advocacy, and explore the grave consequences of platforms that do not prioritize the privacy of its users.
About Esra’a Al Shafei: Esra'a Al Shafei is a Bahraini human rights activist, an outspoken defender of free speech, and founder of Majal.org, a network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices. Together with her team, they build web projects that creatively facilitate the struggle for social justice in the region, including platforms such as: CrowdVoice.org, an open source tool that curates and contextualizes data on social movements, Mideast Tunes, the largest platform for regional underground musicians who use music as a tool for advocacy, Ahwaa.org, a bilingual tool for LGBTQ youth in the Arab world that leverages game mechanics to facilitate high-quality interactions, and Migrant-Rights.org, the primary resource on the plight of migrant workers in the Gulf.
Esra’a currently serves on the Global Future Council on Human Rights and Technology at the World Economic Forum and is a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab.  Previously, she was a Senior TED Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. In 2017, she was elected to the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Esra’a is the recipient of the “Berkman Award” from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for "outstanding contributions to the internet and its impact on society over the last decade", the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for the betterment of humanity, and the "Most Courageous Media" award from Free Press Unlimited. In 2014, she received the Human Rights Tulip Prize, awarded annually by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to organizations or individuals that support human rights in innovative ways. She is the 2018 recipient of the Global Trailblazer Award from Vital Voices.

12:00 PM – Lunch, catered by Oasis, in Food for Thought

12:45 PM – Panel Discussion

“Balancing Engagement and Privacy on Campus”

Panelists:  Esra’a Al Shafei (Majal.org); Rishab Nithyanand (Assistant Professor, Computer Science); Iulian Vamanu (Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science); Mahrya Burnett (Scholarly Communications Librarian, University Libraries)

2:15 PM – Break (coffee, tea, and light snacks) in Food for Thought

2:30 PM – Interactive Workshops

Research Assignment Design with Privacy in Mind

Cathy Cranston (Undergraduate Engagement Librarian), 1140 LIB

If you would like to discover ways to get students to dig deeper into the their information landscape, and then work harder to think critically about what they’ve found, please join us for this workshop where we will discuss designing effective library research assignments. We’ll talk about how to make privacy issues relevant to a generation trained to share everything, and how to insert information literacy concepts into your course assignments in a seamless way. Using backwards design as the approach, we’ll work on real world assignments, so please feel welcome to bring along one of yours to work on during the session.

“Immunize Your Students against Misinformation: a Lateral Reading Approach”

Timothy Arnold (International Studies Librarian), 1022 LIB

In academia, we talk a lot about critical thinking. Becoming a good critical thinker is one of the primary goals of a liberal education, but we don’t talk enough about teaching our students critical reading techniques. Last year, a study was conducted at Stanford University in which Stanford undergraduates were asked to distinguish between a real information source and a fake source. Three-quarters of the Stanford students failed this task. The researchers concluded that the students failed because they were reading “vertically” rather than “laterally,” meaning they were trying to determine veracity through close-reading rather than through a preponderance of evidence discovered by consulting a variety of sources.  In the Library’s course, Being Responsible Online, we have been teaching lateral reading for the past two semesters in order to change our students’ information seeking habits and improve their critical thinking about information they find online. In this workshop, we will demonstrate lateral reading using activities developed in Being Responsible Online.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Sara Scheib in advance at (319)335-3024 or sara-scheib@uiowa.edu