Fostering Privacy Literacy among High School Students by Leveraging Social Media Interaction and Learning Traces in the Classroom

Abstract

With daily social media consumption among teens exceeding eight hours, it becomes increasingly important to raise awareness about the digital traces they leave behind. However, concepts of privacy literacy such as data and metadata can seem abstract and difficult to grasp. In this short research paper, we tackle this issue by designing, implementing and presenting an evaluation of a novel technology-enhanced pedagogical scenario for high school students. The scenario covers two main sessions. In a first session the SpeakUp social-media-like classroom interaction app is used to support a digitally mediated debate. In the second session, the actual learning traces from the digitally mediated debate are used as an object of study to enable students to reflect on the traces they leave behind on social media platforms. In order to enable this scenario we extended the existing SpeakUp app to the specifics of the context. The scenario was implemented and evaluated in real classrooms during a semester-long course on digital skills with 45 high school students. Our results show that the learning scenario is appreciated by students and even though non-STEM students might require more onboarding to be fully engaged in the digitally mediated debate, students from both STEM and non-STEM classes learn effectively. We discuss shortcomings and future research avenues.