1 Introduction

Contemporary society is undergoing digital transformation, where those industrial machines that have been the most apparent effect of industrial revolution are becoming more and more digital, where production and services are increasingly under the control of fully digital machines, where social and personal relations are ever more mediated by digital infrastructures and devices.

Society is assisting to what we have called “the informatics revolution” (Nardelli, 2022b, p. 40), characterized by a new breed of machines (i.e., computers), radically different from the industrial machines, mere amplifiers of physical capabilities of human beings, challenging the primacy of mankind. Indeed, we use for computer-based systems the term cognitive machines (Nardelli, 2018), since they operate at a level that until now was the exclusive domain of people, while currently, as everybody is clearly seeing with their very recent examples in the form of generative artificial intelligence systems, they are able to produce data from other data with a level of competence, which appears to be at the same level of humans.

As a consequence of the industrial revolution, school curricula changed worldwide and added education in those scientific subjects (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), which now are part of the cultural background of all citizens, allowing them to participate in an informed way to social life and to take part in discussions regarding technological choices with at least a basic comprehension of which are the underlying scientific concepts. It is important to recall that school education on these subjects has focused on fundamental concepts and principles, while training on more operational aspects has been limited to those curricula aiming at entering the workforce right after the school, without continuing with tertiary education.

The same kind of change should happen now, as a consequence of the informatics revolution (Caspersen et al., 2019). However, while some countries all over the world have already started moving in this direction (e.g., United Kingdom has introduced a mandatory curriculum in computing since school year 2014–2015), the focus in the European Union has been limited until very recently on digital skills, that is, the operational level where people is able to use devices and programs without necessarily understanding the underlying scientific principles. Of course, this is an important capability for everybody, but forgetting about scientific education risks incurring in the situation the great Leonardo da Vinci already condemned in his A Treatise on Painting: “Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who drives a ship without using rudder or compass, who never can be certain where the ship is hailing.”

However, focusing only on informatics education in school, while necessary, is not all we need. Forgetting to educate children also on how digital systems may affect social and personal relations risks would be a dramatic mistake. As the Digital Humanism manifesto has clearly stated, “Education on computer science/informatics and its societal impact must start as early as possible. Students should learn to combine information-technology skills with awareness of the ethical and societal issues at stake” (DigHum, 2019).

It is therefore highly crucial that students understand since the early years that any choice, since the very first ones regarding which elements to represent and how to represent them to the ones deciding the rules for the processing itself, “is the result of a human decision process and is therefore devoid of the absolute objectivity that too often is associated to algorithmic decision processes” (Nardelli, 2021, p.206).

2 The Challenge: Cognitive Machines

The central point for informatics education in school is the understanding that cognitive machines operate on a purely logical and rational level where they compute data from other data, without any awareness of what they do or any comprehension of what they produce. When computers are used to automate decision processes, the consideration of what it means to be a human being is completely absent. Since in many cases there is not a single best way of making decisions, and even the same act of selecting which elements to base the decision on may affect the outcome, then the identification of the final synthesis among the many conflicting positions requires a full consideration of human nature and therefore the “embodied intelligence of people, not the incorporeal intelligence of cognitive machines” (Nardelli, 2021, p. 205). That is why school education regarding informatics has to run on the two legs of understanding its fundamental scientific principles and being aware of the breadth and width of impact of its technologies. We will see in the next section a European example of this approach, which might be of wider application.

The danger of forgetting about this aspect emerges in the current hype, which is surrounding the so-called generative artificial intelligence systems, for example, ChatGPT. They are capable of producing—in response to user questions—natural language texts. These appear to be generally correct, but at closer inspection, they turn out to be marred by fatal errors or inaccuraciesFootnote 1. In other words, if you do not already know the correct answer, what it tells you is likely to be of no help at all. Without going into technical details, this is because answers are produced on the basis of a sophisticated probabilistic model of language that contains statistics on the most plausible continuations of sequences of words and sentences. ChatGPT is not the only system of this type, as several others are produced by the major companies in the field; however, it is the most famous one, and its version 4, recently released, is considered to be even more powerful.

For these systems, we will use the acronym SALAMI (Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences), created by Stefano Quintarelli, to indicate systems based on artificial intelligence, precisely in order to avoid the risk of attributing them more capabilities than they actually have (Quintarelli, 2019).

One element that we too often forget is that individuals see “meaning” everywhere. The famous Californian psychiatrist Irvin Yalom has written the following: “We are meaning-seeking creatures. Biologically, our nervous systems are organized in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations” (Yalom, 2000, p. 13). This is why when reading a text that appears to be written by a sentient being, we think that who produced it is sentient. As with the famous saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” we can say that “intelligence is in the brain of the reader.” In fact, the main threat SALAMI pose to humans is that they exhibit humanlike competence on the syntactic level but are light-years away from our semantic competence. They have no real understanding of the meaning of what they are producing, but (and this is a major problem on the social level) since they express themselves in a form that is meaningful to us, we project onto their outputs the meaning that is within us.

This cognitive trap we are falling into when faced with the prowess of SALAMI is exacerbated by the use of the term “artificial intelligence.” When it began to be used some 70 years ago, the only known intelligence was that of humans and was essentially characterized as a purely logical-rational competence. At that time, the ability to master the game of chess was considered the quintessence of intelligence, while now this is not true anymore.

We now speak about many dimensions of intelligence (e.g., emotive, artistic, linguistic, etc.) that are not purely rational but are equally important. On the other hand, our intelligence is inextricably linked to our physical body. By analogy, we also talk about intelligence for the animals that are closer to us, like dogs and cats, horses and dolphins, monkeys, and so on, but these are obviously metaphors. In fact, we define in this way those behaviors that, if they were exhibited by human beings, would be considered intelligent.

Using the term “intelligence” for cognitive machines is therefore dangerous. As proved by the last instances of generative AI systems, these machines have reached and sometimes surpassed our capabilities in areas that require inference from very large sets of data, but to use for such systems the term “intelligence” is misleading. To do so with regard to that particular variant that is SALAMI runs the risk of being extremely dangerous on a social level, as illustrated by the following example. It was recently reportedFootnote 2 a “conversation” that took place between a user identifying himself as a 13-year-old girl and ChatGPT. In summary, the user says she met on the Internet a friend 18 years older than her, whom she liked and who invited her on an out-of-town trip for her upcoming birthday. ChatGPT in its “replies” says it is “delighted” about this possibility that will certainly be a lot of fun for her, adding hints on how to make “the first time” an unforgettable event. Harris concludes by saying that our children cannot be the subjects of laboratory experiments.

Criticizing and understanding the limitations of current generative AI systems does not mean halting research and technological development in this field. On the contrary, SALAMI can be of enormous help to mankind. However, it is important to be aware that not all technologies and tools can be used freely by everyone. Cars, for example, while being of unquestionable utility, can only be used by adults who, after having undergone an appropriate training, have passed a special exam. Note that we are talking here about something that acts on the purely physical level of mobility and, despite this, it does not occur to us to replace children’s strenuous (sometimes painful) learning to walk by equipping them with electric cars because this is an indispensable part of their growth process.

Cognitive machine technology is the most powerful one that mankind has ever developed, since it acts at the level of rational inference making, a capability that led us, from naked helpless apes, to be the lords of creation. To allow our children to use SALAMI before their full development means undermining their chances of growth on the cognitive level, just as it would happen if, for example, we allowed pupils to use desktop calculators before they had developed adequate mathematical skills.

Obviously in university, we have a different situation, and we certainly can find ways of using SALAMI that can contribute to deepening the study of a discipline while preventing their use as a shortcut in the students’ assigned tasks. Even more so in the world of work, there are many ways in which they can ease our mental fatigue, similar to what machine translation systems do in relation to texts written in other languages.

It is clear that before invading the world with technologies whose diffusion depends on precise commercial objectives, we must be aware of the dangers. Not everything the individual wishes to do can be allowed in our society, because we have a duty to balance the freedom of the individual with the protection of the community. Likewise, not everything that companies would like to achieve can be allowed to them, especially if the future of our children is at stake.

Innovation and economic development must always be combined with respect for the fundamental human rights and the safeguard of social well-being. The potential benefits are enormous, but so are the risks. The future is in our hands: we must figure out together, democratically, what form we want it to take.

3 The Social Impact of Digital Technology

The long-term effects on society of digital artifacts are difficult to foresee. Consider, for example, the platform for social networks: 20 years ago, when they started, they were welcomed as an essential tool to more easily keep contacts with friends and relatives overcoming space and time constraints. Lately, they are, rightly so, considered as one element that has fostered a strong polarization of the public debate and a wider spreading of misinformation. For this purpose, we coined the Law of the social impact of digital technology: “The social impact of digital technology is highly difficult to predict, even considering the Law of the social impact of digital technology” (Nardelli, 2022b, p. 16). Those familiar with the wonderful book Gödel, Escher, Bach will recognize the variation of the Hofstadter law on the time needed to perform complex activities. With different words, David Bowie, in a prescient interview on BBC in 1999 about the future of the Internet, expressed a similar worry: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. No it’s not a tool, it’s an alien life form.”Footnote 3

Of course, difficulty of prediction cannot be taken as an excuse for not undertaking the task of analyzing the possible uses and misuses of digital technologies! Along the same line of reasoning, we cannot avoid raising awareness in students about the social impact of digital technologies at the same time we teach them in school their scientific fundamentals.

Given the majority of mankind has become familiar with digital systems only in the last 20 years, we think the law we have formulated is strongly grounded. Even more considering the technology of cognitive machines is more disruptive than the one of the printing press, more unsettling than the industrial revolution one, and the exponential number of possible interactions between technology and scenarios is overwhelming. In fact, what has happened with digital technologies is that, in just a couple of decades, they have upended two Pillars of Hercules, two Laws of Nature, which have always accompanied our existence on this planet.

The most important one is that everything, sooner or later, dies. Each living being ends, and with his death, often, his actions and relations fade away. Sure, famous people had statues and immortal authors lived through their works, but that has been an exception, not available to the majority of common people. This is less and less true in the digital world, where, on the contrary, dead actors are brought back to (digital) life, curbing common sense.

The second one is the overcoming of spatiotemporal barriers, which allows the instantaneous replication everywhere of our “digital double,” at the simple click of a button. The elimination of these barriers has made popularity a planetary phenomenon, spreading at a speed and to an extent never seen before. Just consider the popularity of a video: while before the creation of YouTube to reach a very large audience might require years, maybe never touching some countries, the most viewed videosFootnote 4 on this platform have more than a thousand million visualizations, obtained in a few months.

Above facts are so far away from our natural experience that education is the only way of developing awareness of its consequences. For example, the fact that what has been released on the Internet will stay there forever is something so outside the common facts of life that children and teenagers require explicit education to avoid doing mistakes that later could severely regret. Here, we are in uncharted waters, and only a careful education on Digital Humanism principles since the early years will allow the new generations to be able to cope with these new challenges.

This is the motivation why we have advocated that society in the future subjects all significant digital innovations to a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) (Nardelli, 2022a, p. 357). Until the 1960s, the era when the environmental movement gained strength, there was little concern for the environmental consequences of human activities. Later came the awareness of the importance of assessing how they affect the land. Thus, in many countries around the world, the principle of the need to assess the environmental impact of a project before proceeding with its construction has been established. We think the time is ripe to introduce in our society the requirement of a Social Impact Assessment for any significant digital transformation. The SIA can empower all of us. That is why, it is also important at the educational level to develop from school what we call digital awareness, attention to how the tools of digital technology affect social relations, and to train designers at university who have sensitivity to these aspects and are able to dialogue with experts (sociologists, social psychologists, philosophers, etc.) on these issues.

4 An Example: The European Approach to Digital Education

Informatics Europe (the European association of university departments and industrial research laboratories working in the field of computer science and computer engineering), in collaboration with the ACM Europe Council (the European committee of the Association for Computing Machinery—the world’s largest international association of academics and computer science professionals), started working since 2012 on the topic of teaching informatics in schools, in order to enable Europe to be a leader in the global digital society.

In 2018, they founded the Informatics for All coalitionFootnote 5, together with the Council for European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS), and published a strategy paper (Informatics for All, 2018) identifying the goal of providing all citizens with a basic education in informatics, by introducing it as subject since the earliest years of school like it happens for mathematics and other sciences. The Technical Committee on Education of the International Federation on Information Processing (IFIP) also joined the coalition in 2020. We synthesized this goal by paraphrasing a slogan that is the basis of modern democracies with a keyword highly used in the last months in the European Recovery and Resilience FacilityFootnote 6: “no digital transformation without informatics education” (Nardelli, 2022a).

The coalition worked on the definition of a common reference framework for informatics as a subject to be taught in school. The main challenges it had to face were that, on the one hand, education is an issue that at the level of the European Union remains the responsibility of the individual member states; on the other hand, there is a great variety of languages, cultures, and school systems in the European continent. Therefore, instead of trying to devise a curriculum for teaching informatics valid for all European schools (an almost impossible mission), the coalition set itself the goal to define a high-level reference framework that provides a shared vision of the discipline while allowing each country to implement its own curriculum in a manner compatible with its history and tradition. “Unity in diversity” was the guiding motto.

Defining a minimal set of high-level requirements for all European countries seemed to be the right goal to allow each State to define its own specific approach while coordinating the different paths toward the common goal of being able to better compete in the global market of the digital society through an effective and respectful collaboration and integration. Since the coalition was fully aware that the process of building a political consensus in Europe is delicate and difficult, and rightly so, considering the extreme heterogeneity of the peoples who inhabit it, it chose a smooth and minimal solution. We think a similar approach can be useful also for other regions of the world, where different cultural backgrounds coexist within the same educational system.

To this end, the framework is intentionally concise and flexible. It lists only five competency goals that all students should achieve at the end of their compulsory schooling, also paying attention to the social aspects of digital technologies, a topic whose relevance is continuously growing (Informatics for All, 2022):

  1. 1.

    Use digital tools in a conscious, responsible, confident, competent, and creative way.

  2. 2.

    Understand the principles and practices of informatics and their multifaceted applications.

  3. 3.

    Analyze, design, frame, and solve problems “informatically.”

  4. 4.

    Creatively develop computational models to investigate and communicate about phenomena and systems.

  5. 5.

    Identify and discuss ethical and social issues associated with computational systems and their use, potential benefits, and risks.Footnote 7

The framework is conceived as a “high-level map” of informatics that identifies a list of 11 core topics, each one characterized by a brief description and designed so as to be robust to the inevitable evolution of the discipline (see Table 1).

Table 1 The informatics reference framework for schools
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Subsequently, for many of these core topics, some areas that are particularly promising in the contemporary context have been identified (an example for all is the area “artificial intelligence” for the core topic “computing systems”). These can therefore be used in the specific national curriculum so as to make it attractive to students.

Particular emphasis has been put to stimulate curriculum designers toward the theme of inclusion, since more and more digital systems are the cause of social discrimination, recommending that a specific attention is given to the gender imbalance afflicting the digital workforce.

The framework was submitted to the attention of the various national informatics communities, and the final version, for which the coalition is producing translations in national languagesFootnote 8, took into account comments received from 14 countries.

Particularly relevant, for the purpose of this contribution, is the fact that roughly half of the core areas identified cover the more traditional scientific and systemic themes (data and information, algorithms, programming, computing systems, networks and communication, modeling and simulation), while the remaining ones are focusing on people, society, and ethical aspects (human-computer interaction; design and development; digital creativity; privacy, safety, and security; and responsibility and empowerment). This stems from the understanding that informatics, much more than any other scientific disciplines, has a huge impact on society and people, both individually and in their relations, and therefore presenting it to children while forgetting about these aspects is not the proper educational approach. This has been reflected in the choice of the core areas that make up the skeleton of the framework.

We note that a similar approach has been followed by the survey on the status of informatics education in European schools (Eurydice, 2022, p. 17), which has investigated the status of the teaching of this subject across 39 education systems in Europe. Also in their report, they considered, to analyze how the discipline is taught in Europe, more technical areas and more social ones. The outcome shows that, with the exception of “safety and security,” the emphasis in primary school level is toward the technical ones (see Fig. 1 from the above cited survey).

Fig. 1
A radar chart represents the number of educational systems in various areas. The parameters are primary, general lower secondary, and general upper secondary education. Algorithms, programming, safety and security, and networks have the highest number of systems.

Number of educational systems in years 2020–2021 in the EU covering informatics-related areas in primary and general secondary education [These correspond to the 2011 ISCED International Standard Classification of Education levels 1 (primary), 24 (lower secondary general), and 34 (upper secondary general)], (Eurydice, 2022, p. 57)

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The situation in Europe is going to change since the need for informatics education in school has now been officially recognized.

The European Commission (EC) had released in 2020 a Digital Education Action Plan 2021–2027, which outlined as a strategic priority “a focus on inclusive high-quality computing education (Informatics) at all levels of education” (EurLex, 2020). Following that, in April 2023, a proposal for a Council Recommendation has been published by the European Commission, which has acknowledged that an emerging trend is to introduce informatics “as a separate subject on its own or incorporated into an existing core curricular area such as mathematics or science” (EurLex, 2023a). The Commission admitted that “for some time, most European educational systems fell behind this trend, focusing more on digital literacy and with the digitalization of teaching.” It also acknowledged that “the main limitation of this approach is that, despite providing pupils the means to use digital technologies, it does not fully equip them with the ability to create, control and develop digital contents” (EurLex, 2023b).Footnote 9

The Commission recommended that Member States support high-quality education in informatics at school, by cooperating at EU level on curriculum development, delivery, and assessment and by exposing students to the core elements of informatics, considered as a separate school subject, so as to deliver a more targeted provision that has clear education and training goals, dedicated time, and structured assessment. Moreover, the Commission recommended to ensure that teaching and learning on informatics is supported by qualified and specialized teachers and to promote a diversity and gender-balanced uptake, supported by more inclusive teaching material. Finally, the European Commission intends to develop common guidelines for teachers and educators to foster quality education in informatics and informatics competence indicators (EurLex, 2023a, recommendation #4).

Therefore, it is important that in the early years of school education, more weight is given to the issues related with the Digital Humanism manifesto so that the awareness of the importance of these aspects is absorbed by young students; at the same time, they learn the more technical parts of the discipline.

5 Priorities in Education

In a previous paper, we discussed the level of tertiary education for informatics, advocating that “we should prepare our students in a way similar to how we train medical doctors” (Nardelli, 2021, p. 208). By that, we meant rooting the education on a strong scientific basis but highlighting the need of solving the holistic problem of the well-being of people.

A similar approach has to be followed in schools, where the introduction to the “mechanics” of the scientific disciplines has to be coupled with the reflection on the importance of paying attention to human and social viewpoints.

For example, since the very first conceptual steps dealing with data representation, children can be stimulated to reflect on the many possibilities that exist to encode facts and objects of real life in a digital form and how some aspects may be emphasized and others dismissed by the chosen coding (e.g., to describe characteristics of people, one might pick up more neutral ones like height or more sensitive ones like skin color). In the same way, since the very first exercises with algorithms and programs for data manipulation, children should be stimulated to consider how the embodiment of a general processing goal in terms of detailed rules may happen in many, and sometimes diverging, ways (e.g., just think of any algorithm for ranking based on multiple criteria, where changing the weight given to each criterion may completely change the outcome).

Additionally, pupils need to be educated very early to the value of their digital data and the relevance of their protection and subsequently be brought to reflect on how large quantities of personal data can be used to affect and nudge people and communities. They have also to be sensitized since their early years in school to the importance of a respectful interaction with others through digital platforms and educated in identifying and reporting problems in digitally mediated interactions. In later years in school, the reflection on the many ways information technology can positively or negatively affect society should be developed, together with the key message of the Digital Humanism manifesto of keeping human beings in control of the critical steps in all cases where decisions touch people.

Current educational activities in school in the wider area of Digital Humanism issue are mainly focused on the responsible use of digital technology, which has become a hot topic over the last few years, also due to the fact that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions have relied on online learning to manage the situation. Given the very young age of first use of online platforms by children, it is important for them to be aware of the potential dangers and risks for security and privacy in order to navigate the digital world safely (Corradini and Nardelli, 2018). Promoting a responsible use of online platforms should become a priority for schools, through specific digital awareness programs (Corradini and Nardelli, 2020). Indeed, studies highlight that:

  • Parents and teachers have a key role in developing a responsible online use of digital technologies by students

  • Students generally show a low awareness of the risks they are exposed to while using online digital technologies

  • Educational activities are sorely needed to strengthen awareness in the online use of digital technologies

A comparative analysis of questionnaires answered in a large-scale study in school that lasted 3 years (Corradini and Nardelli, 2021) confirmed the increasing interest of teachers in digital awareness issues, both for them and for their students. Teachers themselves are aware that they need to be prepared to effectively manage educational programs on digital awareness for their students. Therefore, training courses and webinars should be focused on the proper use of digital technologies and social media, including cybersecurity issues.

School curricula for informatics should therefore explicitly consider the nontechnical aspects of the discipline, as it is in the common reference framework described in Sect. 4, so as to build from the beginning of the educational process a full awareness of the human and societal aspects of informatics.

One important area is concerned with the fact that by means of informatics technologies, one can rather easily express ideas and feelings and cultivate creativity. Informatics offers a highly effective set of methods and tools for this purpose among the many creative disciplines. Just think of the field of computer-based games, where each year tens of new scenarios are created by designers and enjoyed by players all over the world. Or consider the explosion of digital art, which makes it possible to reach effects impossible until some decades ago. This is a trend that will certainly be amplified by the diffusion of generative AI systems, but it is important that before starting using these powerful systems, students have learned the basics of expression through traditional (i.e., non-digital) tools. In a second phase, they can learn how to write computer programs to support the more repetitive/routine actions of their expressive process. Only in the final stage they should resort to the help of those very powerful amplifiers of cognitive skills that are these generative AI systems, the most formidable of all cognitive machines. Otherwise, the risk is to face a situation that one is not able to control, like the one highly effectively depicted in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice episode in Disney’s movie, Fantasia. Informatics constitutes a powerful playground to exercise creativity and, for this, holds high educational value. Educating students to seek innovative solutions is becoming more and more important in a world where every information is at one-query distance from a search engine and straightforward expositions on any subject are at one-question distance from a generative AI system.

6 Conclusions

A very pregnant saying of African origin, found more or less unchanged in most of the languages of this continent where humankind was born, states “it takes a village to raise a child,”Footnote 10 emphasizing the importance of the social dimension in the development of the person. Education is clearly a fundamental step in this process, and the merit of the Digital Humanism viewpoint is to bring this social viewpoint in digital education.

To be truly human, as reminded to us by Douglas Rushkoff, a leading American essayist and media scholar often referred to as one of the theorists of cyberpunk culture, “is a team game. Whatever future humanity has will be all together” (Rushkoff, 2018). Or there will not be a future, I add.

This means that in informatics, education is necessary to recover the community collaboration spirit that was widespread in computing until about the turn of the century, when the focus was on the development of common protocols, and that was lost with the explosion of big tech and their emphasis on proprietary platforms (Masnik, 2019), which have put our digital society at a risk of disruption. The most appropriate way to reach this goal is to use a Digital Humanism viewpoint, a deep awareness of the centrality of human and social value during learning of the discipline.

Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

  1. 1.

    Discuss and compare the more relevant risks posed by the use of social media according to the various age levels and how to best educate students to manage them.

  2. 2.

    Analyze your favorite mobile app in the light of Digital Humanism recommendations.

  3. 3.

    Discuss a possible design for a mobile app, taking inspiration from your most used ones, respectful of Digital Humanism recommendations.

  4. 4.

    Discuss alternative designs for an automatic system ranking student in a class, evidentiating positive and negative aspects of the various choices in terms of their impact on people and community.

  5. 5.

    Discuss how the way an internal reporting system of an organization is structured is going to affect work relations within the organization itself.

Learning Resources for Students

  1. 1.

    Forlizzi, L., Lodi, M., Lonati, V., Mirolo, C., Monga, M., Montresor, A., Morpurgo, A. and Nardelli, E. (2018). A Core Informatics Curriculum for Italian Compulsory Education. 11 Int. Conf. on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (ISSEP-2018), pp. 141–153, St. Petersburg, Russia, October 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol.11169, Springer.

    It describes the proposal for an informatics curriculum in compulsory education, which articulates both the technical aspects of the discipline and the ones related to humans and society.

  2. 2.

    Connolly, R. (2020). Why Computing Belongs Within the Social Sciences. Comm. of the ACM, 63(8):54-59.

    It advocates for informatics (= computing) as an academic discipline to move toward the social sciences field, so as to be able to better address its problems.

  3. 3.

    Blikstein, P. and Blikstein, I. (2021). Do Educational Technologies Have Politics? A Semiotic Analysis of the Discourse of Educational Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Education. In Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children. https://doi.org/10.1162/ba67f642.646d0673

    While focusing on digital technologies used in education more than on education in digital concepts, it is a worthwhile read about the political side of education.

  4. 4.

    Corradini, I. and Nardelli, E. (2022). Digital Citizenship is the Foundation of Cybersecurity. The Educational Review, USA, 6(10), 601-608. https://doi.org/10.26855/er.2022.10.015

    A more in-depth analysis of the awareness actions that have to be developed in school education.

  5. 5.

    Nardelli, E. (2020). On contact tracing apps: the ill-posed question of choosing between health and privacy, Link & Think blog post, [Online] April 2020. https://link-and-think.blogspot.com/2020/04/on-contact-tracing-apps-ill-posed.html

    A short reflection on the impact of technological choices relating to the use of digital solutions for the management of the COVID-19 situation, with pointers to main statements released at time by international civil societies associations.

  6. 6.

    Algorithm Watch publication series, https://algorithmwatch.org/en/publications/

    Algorithm Watch is a nonprofit organization covering the impact and ethical questions of algorithmic decision-making.

  7. 7.

    Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI. Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021.

    An in-depth account of how artificial intelligence is affecting every aspect of everyone’s lives and on which basis its power actually rests.