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.

Everyone Can Learn. Everyone Can Grow. Clear The Path.

The Worst of the Best

This week's focus in my graduate coursework on digital citizenship has been particularly heartbreaking, as it has involved looking at how some people are able to take some the greatest tools for communication and information-sharing the world has ever known and, rather than use them for personal and societal growth, twist them into methods for tormenting others. 

Copyright: Protecting Creators For 3 Centuries and Counting (Maybe)

The notion of copyright--actually a set of rights held by the originator of a creative work--is an old and important one. Copyright establishes the sole right of a work's creator to publicize, duplicate, modify, and sell that work. Its current essential form, in which copyright is established and protected for creators by the government, dates back over 300 years, to the British Parliament and the Statute of Anne in 1710. Indeed, one of the earliest laws in the newly-formed United States of America was the Copyright Act of 1790. While the details and mechanisms of copyright protection have evolved over the years both in the U.S. and worldwide, the notion that creators enjoy some rights and require some protections has been a vital component of creative and intellectual progress.

The Digital Non-Natives Are Restless

As part of my graduate coursework this week, I was assigned to do a Google search on myself, in order to determine my digital footprint. I was both delighted and dismayed to discover that I have next to no Google-able footprint. Delighted because, as a digital non-native, the idea of anyone in the world being able to discover large amounts of information about me (even innocuous information that I wouldn't think twice about sharing if asked) with a few clicks on a keyboard is still a little mind-blowing, and dismayed because, while I myself am apparently hard to find online, there are plenty of others with names similar to mine who readily appear, and most of these people do not appear to be people I want to be mistaken for. It appears that arrest and prison records come up fairly easily on Google (and Bing, and Yahoo). It also appears that my name is way more common than I think.

On Digital Citizenship

The first week of my latest graduate class, Digital Citizenship, has come and gone, and has led me to examine two main concepts: my own definition of what the term "digital citizenship" means, and the most vital elements of that citizenship.