Tuesday, May 18th from 1:30 - 2:30 pm

Symphony Bruce

Symphony Bruce (she/her), Interim Business Librarian at American University, supports students and faculty at the Kogod School of Business and first year writing students. Largely influenced by her time as a high school English teacher, Symphony believes deeply in the power of relationships and care in the ability to create powerful learning experiences for students and instructors alike. In the classroom, her favorite lessons include critical evaluations of authority and information ecosystems. Symphony is a graduate of the Library Freedom Institute and advocates for privacy on her university campus. Her research interests include critical information literacy, care ethics in librarianship, and privacy literacy. She earned her MLIS from the University of Missouri in 2017.

Keynote: Imagining Futures: Students and Librarians in Coalition Against a Culture of Surveillance

Privacy literacy is an increasingly important component of information literacy and the educational project of academic librarians. The issue comes to a head when the concepts of privacy and the methods to protect one’s privacy are at odds with technology and policies students must interact with while completing their academic studies. Students have very little power to refuse invasions to their privacy on college campuses, especially in an increasingly ubiquitous culture of surveillance. In an effort to combat this, Symphony Bruce, librarian at American University and member of the Library Freedom Project, has been using her research to explore successful privacy coalitions at local government levels, and is imaging what that sort of power-sharing could look like at our universities. She will encourage participants to imagine coalition building with students at Penn State. 

Wednesday, June 9th from 3:00 - 4:00 pm

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters is a writer and independent scholar who focuses on education technology – its politics and its pedagogical implications. Although she was two chapters into her Comparative Literature dissertation, she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. She has written for The Baffler, The Atlantic, Vice, Edutopia, Hybrid Pedagogy, Inside Higher Ed, The School Library Journal, and elsewhere across the Web, but she is best known for her work on her own website Hack Education. Audrey has given keynotes and presentations on education technology around the world and is the author of several books, including The Monsters of Education Technology, The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology, The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology, The Monsters of Education Technology 4, and Claim Your Domain. Her book on the pre-history of "personalized learning," Teaching Machines, will be published by MIT Press in August 2021. Audrey was a recipient of the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University for the 2017–2018 academic year.

Keynote: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate" — The University as Spy Machine

Digital technologies promise schools the ability to monitor students more closely — to track their presence, their progress, their potential. But by embracing surveillance as a core tenet of education technology, we have sacrificed students' privacy and their safety. This talk will look at the history of the university and surveillance technologies and will ask, how can we imagine (and build) a different set of practices, one that founded on trust rather than suspicion, on care rather than on control?