Tag: digital citizenship

Citizenship.

MULTI-PERSONA-5

It’s citizenship. No qualifier. Citizenship in the singular.

It’s not that we’ve gotten to a place where the phrase “digital citizenship” has gotten overused and we need to find some sort of new buzzword to help folks think they’re talking about something new.

On the contrary. It’s that the actual practices and spaces have collapsed on themselves and it’s time to help people realize they are talking about something very old. de Tocqueville old.

It’s not that removing the digital simplifies citizenship, it’s that it re-complicates it. It highlights the appropriate piece of the term and allows us to have a conversation about whom we want to be in our communities.

In the beginning, “digital citizenship” was a useful term. It helped us to conceptualize the ways we should and should not act in digital spaces. They were new rules for new spaces. We no more knew the ways we were supposed to act and keep ourselves in check in online spaces than we knew how long these spaces would exist – I’m looking at you Prodigy chat rooms.

Now, though, in many of the same ways 13 colonies showed, “Nope we’re sticking around for the long haul and we’d like to codify our existence,” the digital is proving just as much a destination as any physical space.

So, citizenship – period, hard stop.

In the same conversations where we talk about what it means to interact with people in places like parks, museums, libraries, and corner stores; it’s time we start to talk about how we behave in comment sections, chat conversations, blogs (the mico and the old school), and whatever is on the horizon.

Because, somewhere along the way, we started having more conversations about digital citizenship than citizenship and that’s surely a count against us.

It’s not that separating the digital from the physical in the citizenship conversation makes them seem like they’re driven by separate sets of rules. It’s that it implies they are the only spaces separated by different roles.

I act differently on the improv stage than I do in my office. My citizenship or community participation are similar and different in these spaces. My citizenship in this blog and my citizenship on Facebook are different. I decide the tone, how much I share, whom I hang around with, what I look like; and I decide it all in different ways. I do it all the same way I ask, “Is it okay for me to wear pajama pants to walk my dog?” and know it’s not okay to wear those pajama pants to the office.

It’s not that removing the digital simplifies citizenship, it’s that it re-complicates it. It highlights the appropriate piece of the term and allows us to have a conversation about whom we want to be in our communities.

At its very best, it asks who we want to be and throws away ridiculous consumerist terminology like “personal branding,” “identity management,” and the like.

One last thing. Citizenship is more difficult work than digital citizenship, requiring we move beyond locking down privacy, avoiding sharing, and absolute control and editing of what we put into the world.

Citizenship asks us to think about the fact that we are present in communities, whether we like it or not, and calls on us to be the types of citizens we’d like to see living next door.

If Your District is Doing This, Convince Them to be the Adults

It’s at :51 in the video below that my disagreement with these local policies comes into sharp focus.

“I think it clarifies what an inappropriate student-teacher relationship is,” the interviewed teacher says, “and it identifies the means by which we have learned some of those relationships begin.”

That sound you hear is the intent missing the mark entirely.

It makes sense that a school district should want to protect students from inappropriate adults not because they are a school district, but because it is the job of the community to protect its youngest and most vulnerable from such influences.

Closing down all means of communication online doesn’t keep students safe, it makes them vulnerable or leaves them that way. I’ve always had online social networking connections with my students. Initially, in the days of myspace, I attempted keeping two accounts. One was the Mr. Chase who would accept student friend requests. The other was Zac who would accept the odd invite from college friends and people I was meeting in life.

Moving to Philadelphia (and Facebook), I collapsed them into one account. When it came down to it, Mr. Chase and Zac weren’t far apart and I found myself wanting to live by the standards I was hoping my students would adopt as our district attempted to terrify them into online sterility with threats of the immortality of their online selves.

Throughout all of that time, I’ve never once worried that I would be setting an improper example for students or calling my professionalism into question. In my online public life, I act as I do in my physical public life – someone who is charged with helping students decide whom they want to become and then being worth of that charge.

Moreover, this is how you break down communities. It is how you leave children unattended. It is how you miss cries for help and avoid bonds that can lead to lifelong mentoring and assistance.

Telling teachers they can have no contact in social spaces with students is not “clarifying inappropriate…relationships.” It is avoiding the conversation about what inappropriate relationships should look like, adding to the implicit accusations that teachers cannot be trusted outside the panopticon of school walls, and reducing the common social capital possible in online neighborhoods.

Instead, teachers must be given the tools and space to consider appropriate interactions and online content, helped to understand the proper channels when students share sensitive information online, and be trusted to be the same guides for digital citizenship that we should be expecting them to be for offline citizenship in our schools, communities and classrooms.

Things I Know 263 of 365: Citizenship is both digital and analog

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

– Ralph Nader

The son of one of the dean’s here at school was missing this week. Last night, he returned home, and everyone is safe.

After a friend e-mailed me the flier being circulated in conjunction with the search, I posted it to my Facebook page. I also posted it to the Facebook group for students at HGSE.

When I checked Facebook this morning, the post to my general Facebook wall had been shared 14 times in the night.

Each sharer (Is that the proper colloquialism?) was somehow connected to SLA. Former students, students I’d never taught, graduates from our first class, parents of my advisees, students’ friends from other schools – they all shared the post to their walls, though only one of them is near Boston.

It was a reminder of community and one of those infrequent signs that Facebook might be good for something.

I realize none of the people who passed the message along did any serious lifting beyond a couple clicks, but that’s another vote in favor of the virtual network.

The message moved quickly and didn’t require anyone to inconvenience themselves. This was a worry to someone they were connected to and the relative cost for adding their voices was null.

This could have and has had distinctly negative effects. Petitions, rumors and photos go viral in minutes, and attempts to rectify the wrongs take much more work and are largely ineffective.

In this instance, that wasn’t the case. The objective was to spread the word and help someone else. It happened.

Of similar interest was the fact no one in the HGSE group shared the flier to their walls. Ostensibly, they’re the group that had the most investment in the ordeal.

The temptation is to suggest weaker communal ties. I wonder if that’s it. Everyone I’ve met here is quite caring for one another, and I’ve witnessed their support first hand.

The possibility that comes to mind is perhaps the groups – SLA and HGSE – view the agency afforded by Facebook differently.

Without wading into the riptide of the digital native / digital immigrant debate, I wonder if it seems more natural for such an alert to be transmitted virtually for my SLA community while my HGSE community considers it to be a more physically-bound action.  While both are caring and active communities, I could certainly see how the learning environment of SLA would differently shape a person’s paradigm of citizenship and what participatory culture looks like and can look like. It’s possible HGSE citizenship is analog while SLA citizenship blends the analog with the digital.

It seems to me citizenship should be both and the seams should be invisible.