Beyond Big Data

What happens when a university with schools of arts and humanities, business, design, education, engineering, law, and medicine decides to develop interdisciplinary learning experiences for professionals, using the latest technology and assuming a global audience? And when they turn to former management consultants - experts in helping professionals learn new ideas - to help them do it?

Well, in one experiment you get Stanford's new Worldview program. A combination of customized online content drawn from faculty across the university, onsite interdisciplinary and experiential learning opportunities, and digitally-native courses, lessons, and materials to work from in the meantime.

Is it the future of executive education? I don't know, but I had a great time being a tiny part of their curriculum for a new course on Data. I tried to convey how we use digital data and infrastructure matters in civil society should be driven by the sector's defining values of voluntarism (consent), assembly (privacy), and expression (privacy and data ownership).

Here's the list of suggested reading for the class. Check out the Worldview program - it might be just what you're looking for.*

© 2014 Lynn Carruthers, Worldview Stanford's The Science of Decision Making. Photo from http://worldview.stanford.edu/blog/big-picture-big-data-books-you-need-read
Here's one more thing to read - "The case for data ethics." Written by folks at Accenture and partly informed by Stanford PACS Digital Civil Society Lab's Ethics of Data Conference, September 2014.




* This is an unpaid, unsolicited promotional post on my part. I taped about an hour of video for Worldview, they may use somewhere between 0 - 5 minutes of it for all I know. But I spoke with them at length about what, how, and why they're doing what they're doing. I think it's very cool, and one more reason for me to be thrilled every time I realize that I'm lucky enough to have Stanford and Stanford PACS supporting my work.