Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.
Of this week's readings and viewing material (PLEASE don't get me started on what I thought of the Cyberwise YouTube clip!), I found Ohler's brief paper the most substantive, meaningful, and thought provoking (Ohler, 2011). (There's something to be said for brevity--a lesson I need to learn!) His notion that students lead multiple digital lives and his argument for "character education" is quite cogent--even though some may find the idea of "character education" rather reactionary.
He is perhaps somewhat unfair to teachers, administrators, specialists, and school boards. Most by now certainly understand that "studying issues related to the personal, social, and environmental effects of a technological lifestyle" do indeed have a place in school. But I'm not sure that many would (yet) agree with his assertion that "the most important job before us as a society is to help our students understand issues of digital responsibility, and to do so at school as part of a digital health initiative."
Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Ohler. As most of you know, my epiphany from our last course was that we have been thinking about the relationship between "school" and "technology" the wrong way around. It's now beating a dead horse to say that "school" as a social institution is still mired in 19th (let alone 20th) century ideas and values, while "technology" is a revolutionary paradigm which is fundamentally changing every aspect of civilization, of which "school" is just one small part.
As such, rather than thinking about how to "integrate" (and often bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate in our dogged efforts) technology into a broken paradigm of "school", we should be thinking in precisely the opposite way--how do we completely reconceptualize school and integrate it within the new technological paradigm?
In such a different approach, studying issues related to the personal, social, and environmental effects of a technological lifestyle, and "helping our digital kids balance the individual empowerment of digital technology with a sense of personal, community, and global responsibility" do indeed come to occupy a central position.
It seems to me that Ohler is quite correct when he suggests that (many) educators (still) tend to respond to sexting, cyberbullying, and other technology-related issues--both good and bad--in a piecemeal, ad hoc fashion, as if they are unrelated. I see evidence of the same sort of thing when I see how educators are trying (with the best possible intentions) to "integrate" technology into whatever part of education with which they are involved.
The problem is precisely a failure to think about technology holistically and systemically. To use a building analogy, it's like making a building airtight (in a valiant attempt to conserve energy), without realizing the impacts this has on air quality, moisture, mold, and other unintended consequences. It's a failure to understand the building holistically and systemically.
My final thought has to do with the notion of multiple lives or identities. Even if/when schools do see the importance of studying a technological lifestyle, students still lead multiple lives and create multiple identities. We all do. Our "digital selves" are constructs. We--all of us--carefully construct, manage, mediate, and curate our online identities. My own children were already well versed in this by age 7 or 8 as they created "identities" and "avatars" for Minecraft and other online games and interactions. In some cases, they created multiple personas for the same platform, using them interchangeably to manifest different "personalities" online.
So when we speak of "digital citizenship", it seems to me that we must always be aware of the fact that--unlike "being ourselves", so much of which we cannot control or change, in "real" life--our online "selves" are always deliberately constructed, artificial, mediated presences. "Michael Ireton" on Twitter or (shudder!) Facebook is not the same as "Michael Ireton" in this online world, and not the same again as "Michael Ireton" in real life. (Not to mention alternate online personalities I may or may not have created.)
As one of the participants in Burnett's study (Burnett, 2011) said of her online persona, "It's like it's me but it's a bit more of me."
It is deeply naive to think there is a direct one-to-one relationship between who we are offline and "who we are" (possibly plural) online.
References:
Ohler, J. (2011). Digital Citizenship Means Character Education for the Digital Age. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 48(1), 25-27
Burnett, C. (2011). Pre-service teachers' digital literacy practices: exploring contingency in identity and digital literacy in and out of educational contexts. Language and Education, 25(5), 433-449.
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