Sunday, September 29, 2019

A (Naturalized?) Digital Citizen

This week is the end of my Digital Citizenship course in the Lamar Digital Learning and Leading program. Part of the coursework has been to develop a mantra to embody my philosophy of what digital citizenship means. After considering what actions, thoughts, and principles make up digital citizenship, and thinking about how to encapsulate all of things into one guiding statement, I have concluded that what digital citizenship (and citizenship in general) really means is that every person has the right to strive to reach their full potential and the obligation to do everything possible to enable others to do the same. In short:

Everyone can learn, Everyone can grow. Clear the path.


Reaching this conclusion involved considering some things I hadn't before. One particularly important concept I encountered was the implications of the different perspectives from which digital natives and non-digital natives view the world. It isn't as simple or superficial as saying that younger people like interacting with screens more than older people do; those digital citizens who have never known a world without the internet don't differentiate between the physical and online world the way their older counterparts do. To them, the two worlds meld into each other and are inseparable. Older digital citizens (myself included) almost inevitably divide the world into online and offline experiences, and as such may not always understand the digital experience that younger citizens are having. This has significant implications when it comes to dealing with copyright and cyberbullying, for example: students who have never known a world where information was sometimes difficult to access have a different perspective on intellectual property than their teachers, and adults who do not live large portions of their lives online may have difficulty understanding the pervasive impact that cyberbullying can have on younger people.

Like many teachers in the current school environment, I have experience guiding my students in developing what my district calls "digital citizenship," but in many ways, this is nothing more than a list of rules, rather than a set of guiding principles. While these rules and expectations are good and wise as far as they go, they don't help students navigate the uncharted territory they will certainly encounter as they leave the school environment and as technology continues to expand and develop in ways we can't dream of today. Like a good constitution that helps frame the more specific laws of a nation, a strong notion of digital citizenship can help students (and anyone else) determine what the best course of action will be in any number of unpredictable scenarios.


In this sense, some of the most useful pieces of work I completed in this course, aside from the mantra itself, were the various case studies that made me apply the information I was learning to real-world situations involving issues like copyright and cyberbullying. Not only were these assignments of practical use in seeing the real-life ramifications of various digital citizenship ideas, they were also instrumental in examining how to break down a situation and determine what principles of digital citizenship were applicable, and how not every issue is completely clear-cut. To me, this was the most valuable experience I gained from the course.


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