A while back I shared some ideas for talking about Digital Citizenship using visual metaphors. It's important to continue these conversations in school amongst educators and with our students. We have to involve parents too.

Digital Citizenship isn't an expression often heard outside of school. The ways in which it's discussed in main stream media are quite different from how it's discussed in schools. Most often the popular press shares sensational negative stories how kids use the internet and their phones to hurt each other.

We have to have open and honest conversations about how things can and have gone wrong and what we can do to make things better in the aftermath of things like cyber bullying, online harassment, or sexting. That said, it's a far more powerful message to talk to kids and parents about how engendering empathy helps us understand each other so we choose not to hurt each other. It's also important to share stories and ideas how our modern mobile technologies empower us to effect positive change in the world around us in ways that weren't possible 10 or 15 years ago.

We have to move beyond stranger danger and scare tactics. Sharing frightening stories (often overstated) does nothing to model positive outcomes or move the conversation to discussions of how to deal with something gone wrong.

Kids need more models of empathy and empowerment. Parents do too.

Below is an interactive "stand alone" presentation I made specifically to start these kind of conversations with parents. Many of the slides are "clickable"; clicking on the centre of a slide will take you to the online article or resource displayed. There are also several short videos embedded throughout. It should take about 20 minutes to work through it all, including the videos. I hope the conversations it starts last much longer.

If you use anything I've shared here let me know how it goes.

Maybe this is just a personal pet peeve of mine but there's a difference between Digital Ethics (ethical and responsible use and behaviour) and Digital Citizenship. The later is really about doing the things a good citizen does: participate in the governance of the community to which you belong, make a meaningful contribution to the global knowledge commons, leave things a little better than how you found them. i.e. participate in the community in ways that improve it.

It seems to me people often confuse ethics with citizenship. Both are important, they may even overlap in some places, but they're not the same thing.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by mars_discovery_district

... was the title of the Keynote address I gave to 500+ educators at this year's B.Y.T.E. conference. The sense I had of the audience was that many of the ideas I talked about here were new to them. A quick survey of the room while giving the talk revealed only about three people had heard of Wolfram Alpha and I think about the same number had heard of the TPACK Framework.

I hope I get a chance to do this talk again. There are a number of things I think I could have done better.

Anyway, if you're interested, here it is in various formats. You pick how you'd like to take it in.

Audio

Download (20 MB)

Slidecast


Ustream Video (thanks to Chris Harbeck

One of my students came into class today and wanted to share a funny video with the class. I had already seen it and I laughed too; at first. Then I got to thinking.

This video has gone viral; over 15 million views to date.

Searching YouTube for David After Dentist reveals over 1800 results. In classic YouTube fashion, the video has been remixed and parodied. You'll also find that since the video went viral there is now a blog collating all the remixes, parodies, other humourous and viral videos, an Amazon store, various other ways of monetizing the video of a 7 year old boy who went to the dentist, was medicated, and took a while to fully recover his senses.

I wonder how young David is going to feel about all this in five years; when he's in high school. As he struggles to establish his own identity and "fit in," how will he feel if (when?) this video resurfaces and spreads throughout the school?

I wonder if David's parents have fully thought through the future ramifications for David; from the point of view of his future self.

It's cliché; the internet changes everything. That includes our perception of time. I think this is a really important thing to get our heads around: digital footprints can last a lifetime.

It used the be the foolish things kids did faded with people's memories. The internet has a better memory. I think kids today need to learn not only to "think before you post", but to think, from the perspective of ALL your future selves, before you post.

Copied in it's entirety from Seth Godin's blog this short post will be featured prominently in the next conversation I have with my students around digital ethics.

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A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person's name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I'm annoyed by it. I'll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Of course, you don't have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are.

I'm working with a group of teachers in a mentoring capacity. In conversation with another mentor in the project a question came up about social bookmarking. As I read through my take on the issue I thought I'd like to share it here to collect input from a diverse group of people. I wonder if teachers and administrators come out on the same side of these issues:

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"So here is the question, the kids could then start tagging stuff as well to be shared with the teachers and other students, which would be really cool. But what if a kid tags something in appropriate? Can the person that first used the unique tag remove that tag? Does that tag creator have some ownership? Or is that just a risk we take??"

Did you ever have a kid tag something inappropriate?

I've been using delicious in my classes to have students aggregate and share content since November 2005. What is described above, while I recognize it COULD happen, has never happened to me in the last 3 years. This sort of action strikes me as particularly pernicious and malicious:

• A teacher sets up an assignment where kids collect useful resources (web pages) and consistently tag them using a tag the entire class agrees on for the purpose. For example, one of my class tags is pc40sw08. Not likely to be stumbled upon by happenstance.

• A student then tags an inappropriate site, say a porn site, using that tag and it gets aggregated with all the other quality content the rest of the class is generating. Kind of like one kid throwing black paint at a mural the rest of the class has made.

Like I said, while something like this is possible it just strikes me as exceptionally unlikely. I imagine the consequences would be similar to what would happen to the student who throws paint at the class mural, amplified somewhat because this is a very public thing to do. There are parallels to cyberbullying with this and I suspect consequences would line up similarly.

In order to remove the offending site the student who used the class tag to tag it (the porn site) would have to delete that tag from that resource in his/her delcious account. There would be no other way to remove the offending site from the aggregated list of sites.

This underscores why discussion of digital ethics is so important regardless of what we teach when we take it online. This is how I do it.

Lots of food for thought in this. To be completely frank, I see this discussion as more of an intellectual exercise than something that might actually happen. Some teachers may feel that my perspective is naive. Fair enough. Then again, I teach in an inner city school and I've been blogging with my classes going on 5 years. Lots of other educators use social bookmarking in a similar way. I'm fairly well connected and informed about this use of social bookmarking in an educational context and while I of course cannot possibly be aware of the experiences of every educator who has done this sort of exercise with their students and what sort of things have gone wrong this is something that has just never come up. If it did it would blaze a fire of commentary across the blogosphere and that hasn't happened.

So all this gets me thinking ... teaching and learning transparently on the web may open a door to abuses that aren't possible in an offline classroom. A PR disaster for the school or school community can happen in ways that are very public and aren't possible in a face-to-face offline learning environment. Maybe we should close the door on all this stuff ... or, are the benefits greater than the possible harm? How likely are those harms? Do we need a 0% harm solution before teaching and learning in this way? On the other hand, isn't it possible that harm happens every day in classrooms all over the world; since it happens behind closed doors and never sees the light of day, well, that's better than if it happened on the web, isn't it?

Several months ago Melissa Hartman asked me if I'd write an article about social networking in the lives of teenagers for Imagine Magazine. It's a non-profit out of Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth; she's the editor.

I learned a lot about writing and working with an editor. It turned into more of an article about digital ethics than social networking. When I started I thought: 650 words! How am I going to write that much? Over 2000 words later (about three articles worth) I thought: 650 words! How am I ever going to get it down to so few? In the end I submitted about 750 words and the editing process began. I learned how to balance style, content, and story. I learned how to edit myself ruthlessly. I learned how it feels when someone else edits me ruthlessly. And I learned how easy it is to find a happy medium when you're working with a good editor.

This is the article that made it into print, the May/June 2008 issue titled Art Now (one of the two buttons in the top right corner of the window below will allow you to enlarge the image to make it easier to read):

Darren Kuropatwa: Learning To Swim - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Darren Kuropatwa: Learning To Swim

What do you think? Would this appeal to your average middle school student? (12 to 14 years old)