Digital Citizenship, or the rights and responsibilities of who we are when we are online, is a topic in which I am deeply concerned. Often focused on keeping young children safe online (which is important and necessary work), I am more interested in digital citizenship from a higher education perspective and specifically in the liberal arts environment.
Teaching Digital Citizenship
I have taught first year undergraduate students about digital citizenship in a liberal arts environment, created online community and conversation around questions of this nature, and developed and delivered workshops and other collaborations around this important topic.
Workshops, Collaborations, and Articles
I have developed and delivered several workshops around digital citizenship, disinformation in online environments and privacy and security around data collection. These include:
What do we owe students when we collect their data? Was a 2018 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference engaged and interactive presentation that was accompanied by a #DigCiz call for engagement. See more about #DigCiz below. The presentation was also selected as an EDUCAUSE Encore virtual recap after the conference. This session and the call were more about asking this important question then answering it as it is too big of a question to answer simply. I wrote a blog post to articulate my answer to the question.
Assisting as a host during a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at the 2018 OpenEd conference for the Newspapers on Wiki Project
A Digital Pedagogy Lab workshop on digital citizenship
Several local community workshops on “Fake News” in the Columbus Ohio area delivered at
Capital University Annual Martin Luther King Day of Learning
Bexley Public Library Lecture Series
Bexley City Council Retreat
An ELI Workshop and EDUCAUSE Review article about digital citizenship in the liberal arts
Digital Citizenship as a First Year Seminar
Many children (especially in the U.S.) get exposed to the idea of digital citizenship in early schooling. Continuing the exploration into the first year of college allows us to have deeper conversations about identity and responsibilities in digital environments. I use a domain of one’s own project in my class to facilitate this practice and give students a genuine and authentic experience of being on the web. Student’s build digital literacies as they construct a digital identity on a domain name that they own by installing WordPress, choosing themes, and creating content. Although the course has defined sections for issues of privacy; copyright; identity; and security, inevitability these issues organically arise with a domains project. Because students own their domain name we move the idea of digital citizenship out of the realm of theory into practice. The course blog with several prompts and links to the student blogs for the Fall 2016 version of the course can be found here.
Digital Citizenship in the Community
#DigCiz
#DigCiz is an online community that I co-founded that creates a series of online learning events focused on generating conversation around digital citizenship in higher education. The ongoing iterations can be found at digciz.org. Through these learning events the community has created and led several conversations and activities about different topics in digital citizenship in a global community. These included blogging prompts, twitter chats, and synchronous video conversations.