Bridging the Digital Divide: Equalizing Technical Education; Ethical and Linguistic Implications of Bias in Machine Translation

Both my capstone technical report and my STS research paper explore the role of technology in education, but from complementary angles. The technical report draws on my internship and mentorship experiences at Computers4Kids (C4K) to design hands-on learning activities that empower lower-income students with resources and guidance. My research paper examines how machine translation technologies mediate, and sometimes distort the relationships between language learners and the cultures they study. By looking at machine translation from a care ethics framework I gain insight about the relational obligations that can shape the design of technologies. Both studies examine the benefits and drawbacks of emerging educational technologies, and how they can be used to truly enhance knowledge instead of displacing human learning.