SLATE Director Professor Barbara Wasson was recently invited to present SLATE’s research, games and courses on data literacy at the Norwegian Parliament— and received an overwhelming response!

On April 30th, SLATE Director Professor Barbara Wasson had the honour of presenting during Stortinget’s (the Norwegian Parliament’s) conference on the topic “Parliaments on the Web - Open Data”. The conference gathered workers from European parliaments engaged with open parliamentary data. Professor Wasson’s talk, entitled “Empowering Citizens to use Open Data», presented SLATE’s research, games, and courses on data literacy.

Data literacy is about the competences people need to engage with and use the data encountered in everyday life— in all digital technologies, gadgets and services, from social media to online stores, fitness watches and artificial intelligence. It implies finding ways to make data-informed decisions both in everyday life and in various contexts, according to personal or collective goals.

During the conference at the Norwegian Parliament, Wasson talked about how we need to empower citizens through data literacy, enabling them to use such open data for democratic purposes.

The SLATE data literacy work that Professor Wasson presented, included:

• The open online course on data literacy, Datareisen.no, which was developed by SLATE and the University of Bergen (UiB) in collaboration with Digital Norway, NewsLab AS and Feed AS

• Wasson’s University of Bergen (UiB) data literacy course DIGI110: Fantastiske Data and the new course DIGI610: Fantastiske Data

• SLATE’s data literacy games, developed as part of the Erasmus+ DALI project

Professor Wasson was invited to make a presentation because one of the DIGI610 course participants this semester works for the Norwegian Parliament, and this participant was so happy with the course that she had suggested Wasson as a keynote speaker.

Read about the results from the first semester of DIGI610

The positive response to Wasson’s talk was overwhelming, and there were requests to offer the DIGI610 course in English, and to those outside of Norway. Wasson has taken these requests back to UiB for consideration.

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