Digital teaching in a datafied world

In a world of ‘smart’ devices and ever-amplifying surveillance, teachers and learners can’t engage in digital spaces - socially or educationally - without giving away data. Every click, every keystroke, even every deletion is tracked by the extractive infrastructure of the corporate systems that increasingly enhance - or constitute - our classrooms. Whether as web tracking, video surveillance, or analytics collected by institutional platforms, datafication is now a core element of higher education, and our knowledge-making and knowledge-dissemination systems are rife with datafication implications. But do those of us who work in so-called higher learning understand these implications? What does it mean to teach and to learn within this ever-shifting infrastructure? This chapter outlines the knowledge and practice gaps that educators experience in relation to privacy, and some of the reasons they exist. It suggests that individual and even institutional responses to this shift are not adequate to foster educator - and student - populations prepared to deal with our datafying society, and calls for a broad sector-level ethics approach to digital infrastructures and data.