1. Spur Dystopian Imaginings
New technologies are introduced into people’s lives today at a rate unprecedented in human history. The benefits of technologies and the onslaught of corporate messaging can result in a pervasive techno-optimism that leaves people unaware of the downsides or collateral effects of technologies until harms are already done. With the show Black Mirror as muse, we propose two activities educators can employ to engage students’ technoskeptical imaginings. The first is a MadLib activity that employs play as a means to creatively speculate about technologies. The second is a fill-in-the-blank creative writing activity that builds on the MadLib activity while providing students more flexibility in crafting their own dystopian stories. Teachers and students should recognize that while this may be an imagined dystopia for some groups, it can be closer to the existing lived realities of other groups. We hope this approach and these activities can work toward protecting those who are most vulnerable to the harms of technologies.
Developed by Dan Krutka, Autumm Caines, Marie Heath, & Bret Staudt Willet
Madlibs Activity
This MadLibs activity is intended to spark technoskeptical imaginations through absurdity. Studnents should fill in the dystopian story with missing details. However, instead of missing grammatical items, students will fill in blanks with the specifics of a company or technology, as well as the functions of the technology. This activity can be delivered during a synchronous instructional session when the blanks could be crowdsourced from students. If teachers prefer to use an editabloe Google doc to a site like the shinyapps.io site linked below, then the instructor should plan for activities in which students can participate for a few minutes while a facilitator plugs the crowdsourced elements into the dystopian story, accounting for verb tense and grammatical flow, and then reads the story aloud to students.
Fill-in-the-Blank Creative Writing Activity
To get createive writing started, fill-in-the-blanks of this phrasal template. Each individiual or group edits their own Google doc. Unlike the MadLibs activity, students can see the entire frame of the story. Elements of the story are missing such as the “name of technology/company” and “group with power/group without power.” We recommend students be creative… even if they stray from the prompts! Students might compare their final stories against the an edtech audit to conclude.
Background reading
Krutka, D. G., Caines, A., Heath, M. K., & Staudt Willet, K. B. (2021). Black Mirror pedagogy: Dystopian stories for technoskeptical imaginations. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 20.
This article provides further detail for the assignments and may be assigned to students or serve as background reading for educatonal technology teachers.