Digital citizenship – The behaviours and actions that promote responsibility, integrity, global awareness, and ethical and safe consumption and creation of content on the internet.

Students of the 21st century were born into a digital world. I am old enough to recall what life was like before the internet arrived in my home, old enough to recall the chimes of a dial-up connection, yet young enough that I had my own personal computer from age 9 and struggle to fully ‘disconnect’. Digital citizenry taught me how to behave online, what information to share, how to be critical and evaluative of information and how to connect with those outside my ‘physical network’. Thus, I believe digital citizenship plays an integral part in the wholistic development of students in the 21st century. It stands firm in its equal importance alongside wellbeing, academics, culture and physical endeavours.

The school I currently work at has been teaching online for 12 months. As such, at the beginning of the new academic year (September), all students were enrolled in a digital literacy subject. This subject was aimed to address fluency in an online learning environment, teach coding and instruct students around online safety. However, I concur with Richard Culatta in his speech around Rethinking digital citizenship, these concepts being taught at my school, whilst important, do not address digital citizenship, nor does it teach students how to respectfully engage with their community to make the world a better place.

Digital citizenry needs to be explicitly taught and modelled across all subjects and beyond the classroom. If this were the case we would have more people, both young and old, actively engaged in community beneficial activities and local activism.

This local activism could appear by way of using PLCs (Personal Learning Community) to lobby local council for a community garden, or to use social networking sites to build a community of like-minded individuals to help clean up local bushland. These activities are not discriminatory of age, gender or social status and have the potential to benefit all members of the community.

Could we all not benefit for local activism brought about by young digitally engaged community members.

References:

ISTE. (2018, October 11). Rethinking digital citizenship. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/iwKTYHBG5kk