Learning to participate effectively online is a matter of mindset and practice– and the payoff can be big… Done mindfully, digital participation

helps build a more democratic, more diverse culture. Howard Rheingold

Fighting Fire with Fire: Building Strong Digital Citizenship

Jonathan E. Martin 21k12blog.net @jonathanemartin MVCS August 2013

The obligations of citizenship were deeply connected with everyday life. Citizens of the polis saw obligations to the community as a source of honor and respect. From Wikipedia

Idiot as a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs ("person lacking professional skill", "a private citizen", "individual"), from ἴδιος, idios ("private", "one's own")

People who think of themselves as capable of creating as well as consuming are different kinds of citizens, and our collective actions add up to a different kind of society. Knowledge, power, advantage, companionship, and influence lie with those who know how to participate, not just passively consume culture.

The Best Opposition to Poor Citizenship is Good Citizenship

The Best Way to Develop Good Citizenship is by Practicing Good Citizenship

Digital Natives will Respond to our Lead Far Better when we Model And Advocate Positive Citizenship than when we Frown at their Digital Lives.

From Alec Couros, Digital Citizenship

Declare a new RUP

Model Digital Citizenship

Establish Norms and Expectations

Practice, Practice, Practice

What’s in your Digital Citizenship Bill of Rights & Responsibilities?

Discuss: How would you develop and use such a Bill of Rights in your school?

DigCit Boot Camps

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Key Literacies:

attention

participation & contribution

collaboration and communication,

“crap detection,”

When it comes to interacting with the world of always-on information, the fundamental skill, on which other essential skills depend, is the ability to deal with distraction without filtering out opportunity. Howard Rheingold, Net Smart

An antidote to our epidemic distraction lies in a set of astonishing discoveries: attention can be understood, strengthened, and taught.

If focus skills can be groomed, the important next question is whether, and how, attention should be integrated into education.

Instead of complaining about the problem of distraction, we need to teach the skills and habit of attention.

Meditation, prayer, walk in the woods

Sustained silent reading, (art or writing)

Goal-setting, (SMART goals)

Study Skills, prioritizing, calendaring

Bolstering confident, skillful, positive citizenship:

Participation and Contribution

Ferriter Kiva Project

Moby Dick on Wikipedia example

Images

Communication and collaboration

Critical reading and skepticism

“The heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default. Don’t refuse to believe; refuse to start out

believing.” Howard Rheingold

We use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them– that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create. Michael Wesch

One of the side effects or what we call collateral learning for kids who do engage in geeked out, interest driven activities is that when start engaging in knowledge or media production, you tend to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how knowledge and media is produced more generally. Mimi Ito quoted in Rheingold

Open Computer Testing

That is why we are optimistic: because we know it can be done.

We know a whole world of pressing social problems can be improved by peer networks, digital or analog, local or global, animated by those core values of participation, equality and diversity.

That is a future worth looking forward to. Now is the time to invent it.