What is Digital Citizenship?: recap on week 1 and announcing week 2 of #DigCiz

Last week was the first round of conversations that we kicked off about digital citizenship. I started off by presenting on digital citizenship with my colleague Jim Kerr during Martin Luther King day at Capital. It was nice to have a foundation of what Jim had done last year when he presented this topic on his own at this same event. We used the nine elements of Digital Citizenship as defined by Dr. Mike Ribble on digitalcitizenship.net which I think can be helpful when presenting on the concept to people that are not familiar with it. We Periscoped the session and put it on YouTube – We didn’t do a good job of staying in frame so the audio is better than the visuals.

This past week also kicked off the #DigCiz conversations which are an offshoot of #HumanMOOC by Sundi and I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxd7pAt8MSk

We have planned alternating forms of conversation between Twitter chats and Google Hangouts (GHO). This first round was a GHO and it was small, just Sundi, Daniel, and I but that was okay I think that made for a deeper conversation. We talked about some pretty cool stuff including:

• What possibilities there might be for creating a digital bystander training
• Creating journal entries reflecting on who one is as a digital citizen
• Digital citizenry as a transformational experience
• Digital citizenry as a chaotic concept as defined by the Cyenfin framework

We kept returning to the nine elements of digital citizenry and while I find the elements to be helpful in broaching the conversation of digital citizenship, as I start to dive deeper in my own thinking I’m having trouble with them. I’m just finding that digital citizenship is much deeper than any list of themes. In our GHO conversation we talked about how important creating digital identity is to citizenship. How can you participate if you don’t have an identity? What does it mean to have an identity and if someone does not have a well defined identity does that mean that maybe they are new to the digital world – should we take steps to welcome them? But the elements do not mention digital identity except for the element of digital law relating how stealing someone’s identity in a digital space is illegal. It seems to fit into the elements of digital communication, etiquette, and literacy but there is no mention of it.

This week we are continuing this conversation with a Twitter chat and we have changed the date/time to not conflict with the #MOOCMOOC instructional design chat. We will be tweeting on Friday, January 29th at 11pm CST/ 12pm EST using the tag #DigCiz.

The question is “Why is Digital Citizenship Important?” and I’ll do a quick stint here to answer it for myself just a bit: I think for me digital citizenship is important because no man is an island. It has to do with the idea of the public commons and working in public to the betterment of everyone. It has to do with those connections and networks that we talk about so much in learning theory and it has me wondering about informal learning and how we are learning all of the time as we connect with one another. What does it mean to share space? What does it mean to share ideas?

I know these are big romantic kind of questions/reflections… You can join the twitter chat on Friday, January 29th at 11pm CST/ 12pm EST using #DigCiz and help us explore them.