Read and Respond

My first thoughts when reading about the digital citizen are that a digital citizen is probably a bizarre concept to many young people as they do not seem to separate the digital world from the physical world. In The Digital Citizen, the authors assert that digital citizens “are aware of the risks and benefits of the unparalleled degree of access we have to information.” I would imagine that for youth that have grown up with technology and the information age, they do not know anything other than an abundance of information. Knowing how many adults and researchers feel about this access to information, I wonder what youth who have never known anything different would say.

I found the six tenets of digital citizenship to be interesting: “respect yourself, protect yourself, respect others, protect others, respect intellectual property, and protect intellectual property. I found respecting and protecting intellectual property to be particularly interesting because of the arguments we have heard in favor of a society that values freedom of information via the internet and questions “intellectual property.” I personally believe that society should protect and respect intellectual property, but there are many people that fighting for a different cause. Could there be multiple forms of digital citizenship? Groups of digital citizens who hold different values?

Reading about respecting and protecting yourself online made me question whose responsibility it was to teach a student about the dangers that come with using the internet. However, with many schools bringing technology and social media into the classroom, I think that it is now the schools responsibility to educate students on appropriate internet citizenship and keeping themselves safe. It also makes me wonder, is the school now liable for anything the student does on the internet while at school? I have read that a teacher is responsible for the safety of his or her students while they are present in the classroom, but are they responsible, as well, for what they do on the internet while they are in the classroom?

As technology enters the classroom and gives students more freedom, I think that school must develop programs to educate their students on digital citizenship and the benefits and risks of the internet. It would be unfair to give young people this powerful tool without any information on how it should be used. As adults, we know that what you create and post on the internet will be there forever, but we must also teach this to our students.