Week #4 - Oh, say can you Skype?

Digital Citizenship. What the heck is that? Well, to put it simply, it's the responsibility of someone to treat digital media in a respectful way. There are 9 basic tenets to the idea of digital citizenship. Feel free to read them, I'll wait.  Done? Good - it's a good read and I'm glad you did it. So, now that you know what it is the next question is - who's job is it to teach digital citizenship? Is it mine? Is it yours?

Well, the answer (in my humble opinion) is - it's everyone's.  When we teach good citizenship (analog), it falls to the community to do so. The parents, the neighbors, the teachers, the peers, etc. If you walk into a Wendy's, you don't reach over the counter and take money from the register. Why? Because our society has dictated that to be a bad thing. We put those people in jail where they are supposed to learn to be better citizens (supposed to be - this is not a rant on the jail system). Digital citizenship falls to the community as well - it's the bloggers and the web gurus and the parents and the teachers and the peers that teach it. For the parents and the teachers, it's often a struggle to understand the rules at all. But there's hope! There are articles like this and websites like this that help parents and teachers learn more about how to teach our children how to be good citizens in the digital arena.

Children need to be fed, even digitally.

Good digital citizens are not born, they are crafted. Here is a lesson from the Teaching Channel for elementary students. It's about 7 minutes long (in case you're planning your day).

So you can see digital citizenship should start young. Some argue we should start younger - as soon as they receive their first piece of technology. When does a student get their first cell phone? Children are not born knowing how to use them.  They have to be taught. You don't hand your ten year-old a chainsaw and say "Go!"  You instruct and demonstrate, you create a good "chainsaw citizen" as it were. Now, clearly you wouldn't give a chainsaw to your 4 year old. Well, you might, but that's another story.

Not all elements of digital citizenship are created equal. For example, I don't think we should teach digital commerce until children are in their early teens. But rights and responsibilities should be taught as early as possible. But again, it's the responsibility of the community to teach them. We must all make sure that the standards we want are the standards we live by.