Digital Citizenship Week: October 21-25, 2013

I don’t know about you… but I said and did some questionable things as a kid. I don’t think any of them would have landed me in jail… What does throwing eggs at cars get these days?

Brooks-Young (2010) believes that children are the same as ever. They make the same mistakes and celebrate the same achievements, but the world that they are navigating is dramatically different.

I was born in 1967. You can do the math. Also, you will note that it was the pre-cellphone and PC era. I was so unwired that I actually played outside from sun up to sun down “within yelling distance” for lunch and dinner.

Cameras? Cameras were some kind of treasure that we’d discovered to capture our friends’ smiles and laughter… we gave the roll of film to our parents and two weeks later an envelope of pictures magically appeared. Half of the time, we had forgotten what pictures had been taken. An envelope of pictures was discovery. 

Slow Technology provided a Built-in Timeout

It wasn’t that long ago when there was a built-in timeout to “stop, drop, & think about it” before doing something stupid with that picture, text, or letter…

Any impulse control related brilliant brainstorms that we had as kids that involved letter writing or image taking was stalled due to delivery time. It was impossible to execute such schemes in real-time, unless your Dad worked for the FBI. Therefore, any of our most brilliant ideas were scrapped due to the boredom as we waited on the technology lag time.

It was just easier to go toilet paper their house (which I don't recommend as I think it is a crime now). 

Everything online is Public

So, is it really possible, even as an adult, to conceive that everything that we post on Facebook/online is public? I mean, do you really understand how people see your posts as you make comments on your friends' cute picture? 

Or as my technically illiterate friend did… she posted an entire personal letter on her Facebook wall thinking that was our private message system... her clients were able to read the very personal letter until she realized what she had done. Thankfully, there was so social fallout.

But mistakes really do happen and a lot of people see your comments about the things y'all did in high school together... TMI. 

Digital Citizenship

Admittedly, I only listened to my parents after my grand ideas failed. But having the information to reconcile my impulsive decision-making with real world consequences was crucial to my ability to grow up into a decent citizen. Thankfully, I had filed away lessons on citizenship to be referred to at a later time.

So, the lessons on digital citizenship matter. It is like when my Dad stopped littering because he got tired of hearing me quote what Mrs. Johnson said about litterbugs. 

Image borrowed from Common Sense Media, 2013. 

Here are a litany of online resources to inspire a wide-range of lesson plans for about any age groups that gives your students the information to file away:

Common Sense Media.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship week.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship Roundup. 

Digital Citizenship gone awry.

Last night, two of my Korean university students explained that cyberbullying becomes extreme after high school in South Korea. High schools students are much more likely to be bullied in person than online. But something changes dramatically after high school and the chances of becoming a victim of cyberbullying increases even further after graduation from the university.

In Korea, online disinhibition doesn’t appear to be the rampant childhood problem that it is in the United States. In South Korea, there is now a cyberpolice force that handles defamation, along with other online crimes. Cyberbullying appears to be illegal in South Korea.

Cyberbullying is not illegal in the United States. Instead, cyberbullies are prosecuted under stalking and harassment laws. I could only find a cyber enforcement unit under the FBI.

So, what about the parents? 

So... if online disinhibition appears to be just as much an adult problem as a childhood issue… Then a cold-hard reality is that some children might be encouraged by, or modeling after, their parents. 

Therefore, one question for educators is how does your digital citizenship curriculum address the adults' digital citizenship habits that might counter your lessons? And where do students go for help with these matters, if the adults in their lives aren't acknowledging the possible impact of their own online misbehavior on their children?  

FBI Cyber Division. Image borrowed from fbi.gov.