#digcit

With the wide application of social media and technology, the importance of building up a healthy virtual world is more noticeable. In this blog, I will refer to a term called “digital citizenship”. According to Ribble, Bailey, and Ross (2004),    Digital citizenship is the continuously developing norms of appropriate, responsible, and empowered technology use. From my understanding, technology users like the citizen of the virtual world. Like in the actual world, everyone has the responsibility to build up a safe and healthy environment for the society. Digital citizenship also takes the responsibility to establish a healthy atmosphere for the virtual world. 

What is Digital Citizenship?

Digital Citizenship is becoming more relevant as more people are living as much time in their daily lives online as they do in real life situations. Learning skills to practice digital citizenship is an important aspect because of this. Digital Citizenship can be defined as the understanding people have that they should be respectful and outstanding citizens online, respect privacy, and leave a great long last digital presence (Ottesen, 2018). Another definition of digital citizenship states that it is our ability to focus on the direct effect of our actions online and to nurture others to become respectful citizens in our online environments (Ribble, Bailey, & Ross 2004). From these two definitions I can see that digital citizenship is a broad accumulation of many aspects of general respect and leadership principles to help the digital community as a whole better themselves and respect others ideas and environment.

From my perspective, digital citizenship is our ability to continually respect others throughout online platforms and take lead in promoting this culture throughout our participation in different platforms. I also believe that it means that we should be conscious and easily be able to adapt to new social norms and literacies that develop throughout social media platforms and communication styles online. It is similar to how we are citizens in the real world, everyday there is new knowledge and information that guide how we act and think in our day to day lives. For example, in our real world situation right now with COVID-19 we are given new policies on how to structure our everyday lives (e.g. social distancing, stay at home). If you are someone who respects this order and leads others to follow it you are showing strong signs of being a good citizen in the circumstances, if not this shows poor respect and leadership to the community. This can translate to online forums very easily, with the heavy use of video networking platforms such as Zoom, we must show adaptive digital citizenship skills by being collaborative and respectful learners in an online environment where some of us have had little experience. If we lead by example we can bring together our online community very quickly compared to if we choose to not respect these new environments and policies.

Digital Citizenship vs Digital Literacy? Is there really a difference?

Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacy seem to be similar concepts when we discuss them in general, but there is a distinct difference. Digital Literacy defines how we effectively use our skills in using the internet and social media, and how good our abilities are to use these tools for their positive functions such as learning and promoting valid content (Deye, 2017). On the other hand, Digital Citizenship is a term that includes building on literacies, but also emphasizes protecting yourself in online environments, promoting a culture of respect, and understanding what material is valid and trustworthy and knowing how that it affects us (McGuire, 2019). From these two definitions I can see these two concepts are similar because someone must be literate in their digital life to be able to promote digital citizenship and understand it. Digital Literacies show that a user is proficient in the process, but to be a good citizen the user must also know how to respect others, lead others to promote cultures, and surround themselves with safe digital citizens as well. The big difference between these concepts is that they aren’t two terms that can be used interchangeably. Instead, Digital literacies promote a person to understand and cultivate a culture of digital citizenship. Digital Citizenship is an accumulation of digital literacies a person has and this person bringing them together to form themselves as a respected and knowledge online participant and learner.

What can we do to support Digital Citizenship for adult learners?

I think digital citizenship can be supported throughout proactive lessons from our educators to facilitate respect and fluency in online environments. I think that many college aged students have difficulties understanding how to lead others to promote a respectful environment online. Many people get a false sense of security online because they are indirectly, instead of directly making comments and statements online towards other people. The reality is that even though the person sending it might feel less responsible, the person receiving it is still taking directly like they would in person. This leads to a community where mental health can be severely affected by people not supporting a community of digital citizenship. Cyber bullying may seem like something of high school, but in my daily life I still see examples of cyber bullying and harassment online (and I haven’t stepped foot in a high school since 2015). This shows that if these concepts of digital citizenship aren’t promoted by post-secondary education institutions that people may fall back into old habits, or never learn about the concepts of digital citizenship in the first place. In our new age of learning through technology I think it would be a great idea for Universities to implement a 1 credit course on digital citizenship and literacies to help educate students on how their online lives and real lives need to be looked at with the same set of guidelines on how to respect others and promote community interactions online.

Learning digital citizenship skills can help us become better citizens in our real world interactions as well. It is a fluid concept that can give us a holistic approach on how to act online, and take those skills into our real world interactions as well. If we promote being a good citizen in the real world society we can also promote it in our online societies, because everyday these two societies become more intertwined and important for our communication, learning, and interactions.

References

Deye, S. (2017, February). Promoting Digital Literacy. Retrieved from https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/promoting-digital-literacy-and-citizenship-in-school.aspx

McGuire, B. (2019, January 8). Digital Citizenship: What It Means, How to Teach It, and the Resources You Need. Retrieved from https://www.ace.edu/blog/post/2019/01/08/digital-citizenship-what-it-means-how-to-teach-it-and-the-resources-you-need

Ottesen, J. (2018, October 18). New 'digital citizenship' curriculum helps students become responsible tech users. Retrieved from https://edscoop.com/new-digital-citizenship-curriculum-helps-students-become-responsible-tech-users/

EXCELLENT resource from Sylvia Tolisano at Langwitches -- New Forms: Hyperlinked, Hashtagged and Lateral Reading

New Forms: Hyperlinked, Hashtagged and Lateral Reading

Diigo- [LINK]

Reflection

Diigo is an annotation tool used for personal research management. It allows you to highlight, annotate and organise key research efficiently with text, images and screenshots. Diigo also allows you to share research within groups to create your own personal learning network, which would've been beneficial had I chosen to do a group project. Personally, Diigo is the first digital tool I have used for this kind of research work. I am a visual learner, having previously preferred to print out research articles and annotated them by hand so that I could categorise them in front of me in a way that I understood. This was something I struggled with using Diigo; the fact that I couldn't arrange my research notes out in front of me. On the contrary, i found it extremely useful being able to save all my research article links in a categorised list under one application, I would find this extremely useful in future when writing a bibliography. The tool also has its own colour-coding and other categorisation features within it that I look to take advantage of more as I complete my article.

My curated list on Diigo is made up of annotations for my Wikipedia article on Lucinda Chambers, former British Vogue fashion director. I started by looking at a Wikipedia article that already existed of the current British vogue editor in order to get an understanding of the type of things I should include. The other research links were anything I could find searching any related search terms using Lucinda Chambers, using multiple browsers and playing around with different time/date search tools to explore multiple possible search results and find the exact relevant information I wanted for my Diigo list.

Twine- [LINK]

Reflection

I found Twine quite difficult to use. In terms of non-linear story telling I found it hard to write a piece that was compelling as this isn’t something I was familiar with previously. I decided to write a choose-your-own adventure style story but on a much smaller scale. I found it easy to lose track of what I was trying to do with my story between passages and found ideas came and went as I worked along. If I were to try this again in future I’d like to take the time to plan out multiple different pathways for the story two have gone down instead of just reaching two possible conclusions. I wanted to write my story about something mundane and relatable to my age range with a few comedic moments and some unexpected strange little twists, however I didn’t get to display that on as large a scale as I’d have liked. At first I struggled to get my head around Twine in terms of seeing it as more of a story telling device as opposed to writing a game, but once I overcame that it was much easier to use.

 In my research I found it interesting to see that Twine had been used in the development of the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Traditionally, a lot of choose-your-own-adventure stories have a more sci-fi theme to them with a lot of lore, which is why it was so important to me to make such a mundane and plain story; to go against the norm. A large part of the comedic element of my game is the weird mundane shock factor.

Twine is actually a really exciting tool to use for this kind of interactive non-linear story telling. If I had allowed myself more time I would’ve experimented much more with the design aspect, adding buttons and images and playing around with the graphics. You can even add film and sound effect. If I were to do this project again in future i would have completed a much longer and more immersive story with visual aids, perhaps even video dialogue to make it seem as though the reader is actually going on the journey.

Wikipedia Article-

Reflection

From the start I was really interested by the idea of writing a Wikipedia. Although such a useful tool, it’s something we’re often advised against using in the education system due to it’s public access nature. Writing a Wikipedia article has definitely taught me to use Wikipedia differently, in terms of how I find and justify Wikipedia sourced information. I chose to write about Lucinda Chambers, former Vogue UK Fashion Director, as one of the women listed on the Women In Red; a list of noteworthy women who don’t have Wikipedia articles. I'm extremely interested in the fashion magazine editorial industry and was shocked to see that Lucinda Chambers, who had worked with vogue for over 30 years, did not have a Wikipedia article written about her. Using the Diigo annotation tool I was able to curate key information for my article, but it was difficult being able to decide which research sources were appropriate, a lot of the information I found was from tabloid interviews, something Wikipedia specifically disallows. Key information that I had previously thought was imperative to a Wikipedia article such as birthday and nationality proved hard to find but I learnt that this information was not as important as I had first thought; Wikipedia is not necessarily a database in that sense. However, I quickly realised why nobody has written the Wikipedia article about Lucinda Chambers already. There is very little public information made available online as to her achievements or personal information, my Wikipedia piece mostly focuses on her career life. Chambers seems to lead a much more private life than others in her industry, I’d be interested to do the same project again using someone with more publicly available information. 

Had I managed my time correctly for this project I would’ve liked to dedicated some time to non-digital research, it would’ve been especially nice to have been able to find some physical copies of Vogue from during the time Lucinda worked there or even just some early work I could specifically tie down to her for my article. I also believe having looked at some magazines, books or other physical research sources may have broadened my scope and exposed me to information I may not have found online.