For this week’s data visualisation, I tracked how often I unlock one of my devices from Monday to Thursday and if I use face, touch, or passcode identification.
You can see below that I used different colours of sticky notes to distinguish between my phone, tablet, private laptop and school laptop. Each black line is one pickup or one unlocking. You can spot a circle, short line/hyphen or wavy line next to the ‚unlocking’ line, which shows the identification type.
By observing my device access, you can follow me through my day. I can see a link to my commute (from last week): As soon as I leave my flat, I use a passcode or touch identification because the face recognition no longer works with a mask on. Shortly after I enter the school building, I access my school laptop and spent less time on my phone.
It was quite shocking to me, how often I accessed my devices, and there is much room for improvement regarding self-control!
However, I can already see how access and my productivity are connected since I started using the forest app following the personal data task from week 4 of CDE. Tracking my focus time helped me stay away from my phone because I cut back on useless scrolling! In my upcoming blog post, I will go into a more in-depth review of the past three weeks of ‚learning ‘with data.
Very nice dataviz and reflection. Is there anything specific you could take from this to apply to the issue of ‘learning with data’? It has made me reflect on how frequently students may now have to identify themselves to access devices, apps and platforms for learning. Very young schoolchildren are assigned usernames and passwords for G Suite or MS tools, and myriad other ‘edtech’, which only escalates through school into Higher Education. Indeed, unless you are prepared to sign in to a learning management system, you can’t really attend university at all. Now there’s a big move to ID authentication, e.g. for assignment plagiarism detection or online exam proctoring, sometimes using biometric or facial analysis. Processes as mundane as logins, identification and authentication may in this sense be powerful gatekeepers to education, and refusing them potentially limiting for the learner.
Hi Ben, I picked up on some of your thoughts in my final reflection on this block. You’re right; it’s quite worrying how often students have to log in or identify even for quick and easy tasks. Working at a primary school, I see it first-hand on a day to day basis how much time of the lesson can get passed with just all students having their tablets ready and logged in into a particular platform, and it is in these moments that I sometimes wish we could go back to the ‘good old days’ with just a pen and paper. Since there are specific guidelines from the school board and the headteachers, we aren’t always free to decide which method/device to use.
Love the post-it presentation makes really vivid. My question how did you manage to keep track of all these data points. While writing this response I unlocked twice my phone !!
Hi Dima, it was actually easier to keep track of the data points than you would think. For example, I can only unlock my school laptop with a passcode, so each time I did that I kept track in my journal, which is a physical notebook. As soon as I left my flat, I could only unlock my phone with a passcode, because we have to wear a mask basically everywhere and especially at school at all times (apart from a quick lunch break). If there is a circle next to the ‘phone unlocking’ line, you can tell I was at home. Of course, the numbers would be higher, if I kept track on my phone and had to unlock it every time since this would falsify the whole data collection 😉