Teaching Digital Citizenship Competencies

Photo: xresch/ Pixabay License

Last night after I had finished posting a response to "Early childhood educators’ teaching of digital citizenship competencies" (Lauricella et al., 2020) I was reflecting on my own experience and my own understanding of digital competencies education, specifically around the idea that the two most taught topics from K-5 focused on the "dark side" of digital citizenship. The first most discussed topic according to their research was Privacy and Security. In my experience, the teaching in this area focuses around warning kids not to share personal information online, not sharing sensitive images or information (we have the local RCMP come in every year to do a presentation on this), not to talk with people you don't know in real life etc. The other most covered topic was cyber harassment, cyber bullying etc. so again, at least in my experience, focusing on negatives and what not to do, students personal experiences etc.

While I think these topics are important, to me it's an incomplete picture of what should be covered when there are many positive aspects to digital citizenship and digital culture that seem to get less air time. I think back to research I had read by Chesney, Coyne, Logan, and Madden (2009) specific to Second Life and how many individuals treat the Second Life space as a virtual community where they interact with peers and engage virtually in similar ways they would in real life (a primitive metaverse?) and some of the negative experiences that can be associated with that as well. As I discussed in my EDUC 5131 response, my hope is that at maybe older grade levels, some digital citizenship topics that can have a more positive "light side" aspects including "relationships and communication" are covered.

Chesney, T., Coyne, I., Logan, B., Madden, N. (2009) Griefing in virtual worlds: causes, casualties and coping strategies. Information Systems Journal, 19.

Lauricella, A.R., Herdzina, J., Robb, M. (2020). Early childhood educators’ teaching of digital citizenship competencies. Computers & Education, 158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103989