No thoughts only characters with wings

M7 Assignment #1: Reflective Blog #3

Discussing cyberbullying this module has made me want to delve deeper into the topic of digital citizenship for this week’s reflection. As we all know, cyberbullying is a phenomenon that has become increasingly common, especially among teenagers. This has led to legislative action in numerous states in regards to schools, children, and adults alike. But how do we, as parents, teachers, and administrators combat cyberbullying effectively? The answer is to help our children become better digital citizens.

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/turning-students-into-good-digital-citizens

As I mentioned in my discussion post, I believe that there are various ways to combat cyberbullying, but it all has to start with teaching our kids to become better digital citizens. This means that we need to teach our students how to be more than just “cyber safe and savvy” in an ever changing digital world. As our definition of a “good citizen” has changed greatly over the years, so does our concept of digital citizenship. According to Joseph Kahne, Davidson professor of education at Mills College in Oakland, CA, and chairman of the MacArthur Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, it isn’t enough to simply teach our kids to “not cyberbully” or “give out too much personal info” online. He believes that digital citizenship has “less to do with safety and civility than participation in the worldwide online conversation.” This doesn’t mean that schools and parents should disregard teaching their children safety and civility online altogether, but that they can be taught alongside other topics to help their children become more digitally able.

Kahne believes that simply protecting our children is a “thin vision” of what being a fully engaged digital citizen is. He wants a future where young people become “producers and managers of information and perspectives, not simply as people we [have to] keep safe and civil, “ and I completely agree. It makes no sense to to start building digital citizenship skills in our future digital citizens in college or university - these skills should be taught in K-12. Being literate and well-written is one thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning of the 20th century, but it’s not the way students regurgitate and express information that is the issue: it’s the way they find information. In a digital world where news sources come from all directions, it is more important than ever to teach our students the importance of sources and properly sourcing information. Our students should be able to determine not only which sources are relevant, but which sources are credible. As reluctant as I am to use this term that our current president so eagerly insists he coined, “fake news” is everywhere on the internet at the moment, and our students are eating all of this news up without questioning any of it.

We discussed in Professor Lopez’s class the lack of rebellion in kids today. Professor Lopez mentioned how apathetic most of her students are in regards to political issues: nothing is riling them up. One potential reason we believed this to be is due to the way social media sites cater to individuals specific news sources and content. Sites like Facebook and apps like Instagram curate news sources and content depending on what it thinks the user likes or is interested in. This is seemingly very cool and convenient on the surface, but it really limits what our students see and hear about. It’s the equivalent of watching just right wing channels or just left wing channels on TV. You aren’t being exposed to other viewpoints and perspectives, and this can obviously be very troubling. Students need to learn more about properly sourcing their information now more than ever. It makes no sense to have them only acquire information from specific, biased sources in an age where one can acquire information anywhere.

This brings me back to a previous blog post regarding Alan November and his video “Who Owns Learning.” In his video, November recalls a student of his who wrote about the Iranian Hostage Crisis in his AP History class. When November asks him how he conducted his research, the student responds by saying he merely Googled the hostage crisis and used the most relevant news sources. When shown how to use site operators by November to search through different, non-western perspectives, the student was dumbstruck. He had no idea how to utilize these search options, let alone know that these options even existed. Information is so readily available to students nowadays that they don’t feel the need to even question any of it. This is one of the reasons why Kahne advises schools and parents to teach their kids how to acquire and question information along with learning 21st century skills. After conducting a study among multiple schools and student demographics in California, Kahne came to the conclusion that kids who “[have] been given assignments that require them to find different points of view online are more likely to be exposed to different points of view outside of school,” which makes sense. Encouraging the importance of K-12 educators teaching students these skills is vital to the future of digital citizenship.