Digital Citizenship
Well, I seem to have managed to get through November without a single post. My bad. I’ve been on the verge a couple of times but other priorities have taken over.
It’s in that context that I’m glad that this post from Alec Couros came across my virtual desk this morning. I needed to be jolted out of my complacency, and Alec’s post did just that.
This is going to be a short entry, because what you really need to read is Alec’s post. In it, Alec poses some powerful questions about what it really means to be a good citizen in a world saturated with social networks, virtual acquaintances, viral videos, instant fame (or infamy), cyberbullying, large-scale hoaxes, and issues of personal privacy. It is one of the few articles I have ever seen on the responsibilities of digital citizens as opposed to their rights. There are many powerful ideas discussed here.
Enough said–read the article and make sure your colleagues and post-secondary students read it as well. And keep the discussion going. This is important.
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2 Responses to “Digital Citizenship”
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Thanks so much for passing this on. Responsibility first begins when we get the message out, and then, collectively figure out what we will do within our context.
I look forward to hearing how you approach this important topic in the future. I’ll be sure to be transparent in my own context.
All the best, yours in education.
Alec
Thanks for this pointer, Skip. While the concept of the responsibilities of digital citizenship and digital civics has been broached a few times (in my mind it is a natural idea following information fluency), we haven’t gotten further than that. In part because these are hard questions– not just hard to bring up and talk about freely in particular circumstances, but hard because many of the answers are not known. And too often the attempts to answer the question focus on the negative aspects, which is easy but imbalanced.
I’ll blog about this article later, my small part to bring some attention to the issue.