Educating Digital Citizens

This week we looked at the concept of the digital citizen and were asked that in our roles as educators/instructional designers, if we viewed it as our collective responsibility to promote and develop our students as digital citizens and if we did believe that it was our responsibility, how should we go about it. 

I have this some thought and looked t engage my classmates with this and felt that I do believe that it is part of our role as educators to include awareness of proper behaviors to be a good digital citizen in what we do. I think that this responsibility begins at home and that it is primarily the parents who should be distilling the proper character of citizenship IRL or in the digital space. However, I think that this continues on at school and that as educators it is our role to supplement these behaviors and to teach our students how to act professionally, how to communicate clearly, and be respectful in settings with diverse viewpoints. I think we do this in practice with IRL interactions, but that we need to explicitly explain that the behaviors carry over.

Communication in the classroom is something educators push for and include skills of using proper grammar and tone. We work to remind our students that it is important to consider purpose in every form of communication. Our instructions, classrooms, and institutions provide places for them to practice communication with each other and those they answer to (teachers, admin, job applications, etc.) IRL and I think we need make sure that we explain that these are important online too.

Personally, I’ve never been one to think that the third space of digital media needs to be so different that the fundamentals of human connection and respect of others should be different there. The ability to adopt different identities and screen names doesn’t change that.