Digital Citizenship

In many ways digital citizenship is very similar to traditional ideals of good citiizenship that have existed throughout history.  Here are some examples:

  We should always check your sources for reliability whether they are digital or not.

  We should always be careful about what we write, whether on the internet or in a traditional medium.  Once it's written down it's permanent and can follow you the rest of your life!
 
  We should always be concerned with ethics and issues such as plagiarism.  It doesn't matter whether it's in a digital forum or not, plagiarism is inherently unethical and wrong.

It seems to me that the main differences between the digital citizenship world and the traditional view of citizenship are the speed and ease with which information is available and in which it can be spread all over the world.

We have research and communication tools available at our fingertips.  It is SOO easy to find an answer to a question, assume it's correct and send the answer to everyone you know without ever checking to see if it's valid.

So many websites seem legitimate. It's hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones, especially for students who are under pressure to get research papers completed.  It's also so easy for students to find information and copy it into their own work without giving credit to the person who authored the information.

I liked this comparison of traditional citizenship and digital citizenship that I found on Pinterest, so thought I would post it here:

I believe that teachers have a responsibility to foster good citizenship in both the traditional sense and in the digital world.  They can do this by making sure students check their sources and that they give credit to authors.  

Teacher can also create many interesting projects to demonstrate to students how poor digital citizenship can get out of control quickly and have drastic adverse  and long lasting affects.  It is important to teach these things while students are young so that they grow up to be responsible adults.  Learning hard lessons now will pay off for them as they move into the adult world.

I thought the following article from The Atlantic (I've attached the link to it below) comparing the plagiarism of a 6th grader to that of a U.S. Senator was very interesting.  It is written by Jessica Lahey and appeared on July 24, 2014.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/plagiarism/374999/

Thoughts On Sugata Mitra's Ted Talk About the Future of Learning

Thoughts On Sugata Mitra's Ted Talk About The Future of Learning


This was a very interesting Ted Talk.  

I am not surprised that the children who were given access to the computer in the hole in the wall learned to use it and were able to teach themselves about complex issues.  Children are completely unburdened by fears and expectations the way adults are.  I think of my own children and how from very early ages I could hand them my phone and they would fiddle around with it until they figured out how to do all sorts of things with it.  However, I question his thoughts about the future of learning.

Children can be eager to learn but I suspect that the children in the small Indian villages were even more fascinated by the computer Mitra gave them than others might be,because they have so very little.  The reality is that most of them probably do not even have indoor plumbing.  Getting a computer to use whenever they want must have been a monumental event....naturally they experimented as much as possible with it.

School in the cloud?  Sounds great in theory, but I spent last week observing 8th grade classes.  The kids were doing an independent assignment, not on a computer, but they were expected to work independently or in groups to complete the assignments.  Only a handful of these students actually spent their class time doing the assignment.  The rest were either secretly playing video games on their personal devices, or where chatting among themselves about things that had absolutely nothing to do with the assignment.  So, how does SOLE work with a bunch of American teenagers who couldn't care less about DNA (or whatever the topic at hand is) and would much rather be shooting people on a video game or talking about who likes who.  Can "cloud granny" get their attention and keep it?  The teacher in the actual classroom had a hard enough time and he was right there in their faces!
I witnessed a student tell the teacher during a discussion about the Vietnam War that he was going to join the Marine Corps so he could kill Communists(...and terrorists too,he added as an afterthought) because they are bad.  Yet this student could not tell the teacher what Continent Vietnam is on.  Other students had similar issues and made similar comments.  They could not locate Vietnam on a map.  One pointed to a body of water... the Bay of Bengal.    Another had no idea whether France was part of Western or Eastern Europe, let alone what role France played in Vietnam or how any of this history could be relevant to what's going on it our world today.   This was all in spite of the fact that they have been in social studies class all year and they have been studying Vietnam and the Cold War for quite a bit in that class.  I could go on and on.   (And, in case you were wondering, this was not a class full of LD or special ed. students.)  
One thing they did find fascinating was when a student shared that he had heard John F. Kennedy had an extramarital affair.  This immediately caused a great commotion as several students pulled out their phones and began "researching" that issue.

Oh, but I guess it doesn't matter because KNOWING IS OBSOLETE!

Knowing is never obsolete...only how we get the information changes.  Teachers need to provide guidance and push students to learn.

It seems to me that Sugata Mitra is the one in the cloud!!