EDUCATION

Data Clinics

Data clinics are an interactive collaboration and teaching format designed to bridge theory and practice in the field of data governance and ethics. They bring together partners and practitioners with Masters students from TUM to work together in a structured way on real-world ethical challenges and decision-making processes.

The clinics run as part of the teaching program in the Chair for Philosophy and History of Science and Technology in the School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

• Goal: empower participants with actionable insights to handle complex issues like privacy, discrimination, transparency, and accountability, and thus foster wider cultures of ethical data work.
• Invited partners: present a real-world challenge drawn from their actual data practices and issues.
• Collaboration: student teams explore the challenge from multiple perspectives of data governance and ethics and develop tailored insights.
• For more information, see: https://zenodo.org/records/15182264

Data Stories

Short videos (approx. 2 minutes) that explore a specific case-study related to data-work and work through various ethical implications. The stories are grounded in real-life situations and research in the philosophy, history, and social studies of science.

• Plan to create initial prototype data stories (1–2) in 2025.
• Example topic: social and ethical implications of mandating particular file formats in data sharing archives.

Data Ethics Cluster on LabXchange

We are preparing a Data Ethics Cluster in collaboration with LabXchange, to be openly available on LabXchange’s science education platform. “Cluster” is the name for a structured, modular learning programme on the LabXchange platform.  It will provide wide-ranging, learning resources on working ethically with data, to help learners explore the consequences and contingencies of each step on a data journey, and to deal with the conflicts that often arise between different values.

LabXchange has global reach, with most users based in majority-world countries, which aligns with EDI’s aim of making data ethics education widely accessible and usable, in order to serve low-resourced environments in particular.

• Data Ethics Cluster:

• informed by perspectives from the philosophy, history and social studies of science and technology;
• prioritises interactive learning activities to help learners integrate data ethics into their everyday technical/practical work with data.

• Individual learning activities can be combined into “pathways,” which are short, contextualized learning experiences. For example, “data ethics in agricultural research.”
• Users will be able to customize pathways for their own purposes, including by combining data ethics learning activities with other elements on LabXchange.

EDI Website

Our website serves an educational purpose, explaining our approach to data ethics and compiling initial resources for students, practitioners, and more.

• What we mean by data ethics.
• Why worry about ethical data?
• Blog posts from EDI team and affiliates – e.g. reviews of events; overview of an issue, etc.
• Resource list. To be extended in collaboration with partners and affiliates.
• Glossary of key terms. Initial 5 terms to be expanded into concept explorer.