Netherlands VWO 3 (onderbouw) Digital literacy

1. Data, AI and society

Data and data processing (adopted, legal 2027) · Artificial intelligence (adopted, legal 2027) · Creating digital products (adopted, legal 2027) · Wise choices and digital society (adopted, legal 2027)

• Data Literacy: Reading, Using and Questioning Data – Data literacy means being able to read data, work with it and ask good questions about it. A dataset is a table: each row is a case (a person, a day, a shop) and each column is a variable (age, travel mode, price). Every dataset shows only a limited picture: it covers some cases, some variables, some time and was collected in a certain way, so it can be biased or out of date. Researching with a dataset follows steps: ask a question, find or collect data, clean it, sort, filter and count, make a chart, draw a careful conclusion. Open data is data anyone may use for free, usually anonymised first. Organisations collect data about us (purchases, location, clicks) to build profiles, target adverts and plan services, which brings benefits but also privacy risks and rules such as consent.
• Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Learn to Think – Artificial intelligence (AI) is the skill of a computer system to do tasks that normally need human thinking: seeing, understanding speech, deciding and learning. An AI system is an agent that senses, thinks and acts. Old AI followed rules written by people. Modern AI mostly uses machine learning: it finds its own rule from many labelled examples (data). Neural networks are layers of simple units whose link strengths (weights) change during training. AI is used in maps, translation, health, farming and games. It can be wrong or unfair when its data is one-sided (bias), so people must check it, protect privacy and stay responsible.
• Digital Media: How Pictures, Sound and Video Become Numbers – Digital media is any picture, sound, video or animation stored as numbers on a computer. A raster image is a grid of pixels, each stored as red, green and blue values from 0 to 255. Vector graphics store shapes as maths, so they stay sharp at any size. Video and animation are many frames shown quickly. File size grows with resolution and colour depth, so we use compression. When we make or share media we must respect copyright, licences and people's image rights, and work safely and critically.
• Digital Footprints and Netiquette – A digital footprint is the trail of data we leave online. Active footprints are shared on purpose (posts, comments, forms); passive footprints are collected without us noticing (cookies, browsing history, location, IP address). Footprints are hard to erase and can be seen by others later. We live in a digital society where learning, banking, shopping and government services are online; a responsible user of it is a digital citizen (netizen). Net etiquette means being ethical (respect copyright, share reliable information), respectful (privacy, diversity, no bullying) and responsible (avoid oversharing, don't feed trolls). Communication etiquette asks us to be precise, polite and credible; social media etiquette asks us to choose passwords and privacy settings wisely, think before uploading, and verify before sharing.