News Literacy
Course
Literacy is Citizenship, Digital or Otherwise [12:39]
- Learn ways to teach students the importance of their cyberlife.
- Learn to recognize the need for the internal meta moment, or pause button.
- Learn about your digital tattoo or online profile and its permanence.
Jackie: Excellent. I'm so glad you called it citizenship and not just digital citizenship.
Michelle: Right because if you're living by—whatever guide you are living by in real life should translate to the digital world.
Jackie: Absolutely. Your code of conduct for how you interact with people isn't determined by the platform in which you interact with them.
Michelle: Exactly. In your work, you have actually called digital citizenship, which is a state mandate, in many states, at this point. Not to mention a primary focus among school administrators, and very often a responsibility that it has placed on the information technology, professionals, and educators. You called it something completely different. What did you call it?
Jackie: We did. We were designing our curriculum. We called it, your cyberlife.
Michelle: Great choice. How did you come up with that?
Jackie: We have a group of interns who work with us during the summer and during their breaks from college. We began working on our program by interviewing them and asking them to talk to us about what kinds of things they had learned about their online conduct through trial and error, and what kinds of things they wish someone had taught them and helped them to practice back when they were high school students. The very first thing they said to us is, "No matter what you do, don't call it digital citizenship. They're just going to roll their eyes and groan." That framed our conversation. I think that maybe students see digital citizenship as one of those teacher words like assessments, and not necessarily a word that resonates with what they're doing during the day. Cyberlife is who they are.
Michelle: Right. So what does that involve. What is cyberlife?
Jackie: For us, there were three prongs. We looked at permanence, privacy, and productivity.
Michelle: I like the three Ps.
Jackie: Yes, it makes it easy to remember. We developed lessons to give students guidance and practice in each of those areas.
Michelle: So, Jackie, we've also talked about emotional intelligence, that meta moment where we hit the pause button. Where does that…into which of those three prongs does that fit?
Jackie: A meta-moment is when someone has the wherewithal to realize that internally, they're starting to have an emotional response to something. We've all had this experience where we're going through a particular social media feed and we see something in a negative context makes us agitated. And knowing, being able to recognize in the moment that we're agitated, that's when we take the meta-moment. We hit the pause button and say, should I be responding to this now. I need to get up, I need to walk away, I need to feel myself become more composed and then I can re-engage in this thing that I just saw in a way that I want to have it be permanent online. I want to say what I'm going to contribute to this conversation now will push this dialogue forward.
Michelle: There isn't a guideline about, there are lots of little phrases that people can use to sort of advise their children on what to post and what not to post. What you're saying is look back at yourself and internally, your gut is going to help you, but you have to really think and be thoughtful about what's happening in your own constitution before you can decide whether to respond or not.
Jackie: Absolutely, and you have to be honest about what that is. You have to be honest about what that feeling is. A piece of knowing whether or not you should be responding is being aware of the community standards and guidelines. Because as we've said, how you conduct yourself shouldn't change between online and in real life. We all are a part of a learning community, and our learning communities have expected behaviors and expected outcomes for the students. We had our students examine the community standards and guidelines for some of their favorite online communities, like Instagram, and Snapchat, and Facebook, so that they could see that when you click that I agree button, because you're joining this community, you're agreeing to comply with these standards. If you see your online community in the same way that you see, your in real person communities, your in-person communities, then you start to begin to regulate your contributions. We asked students to think about how they would raise their hand and share something in class, and what would it look like if class was online? How would you raise your hand? How would you share something? How would you respond to appear?
Michelle: And the code of conduct, as you said earlier, would be the same, you would carry that over into the virtual world.
Jackie: Absolutely. Absolutely. We would expect students also to pay attention to what kinds of things should be private, and what kinds of things should be public, knowing that permanence is an element of anything that happens online. Back in the day of me walking down my high school hallway, the way we transferred a message to someone was by writing it on a piece of paper, folding it up, and stuffing it through the vent of their locker. The walk from my classroom to someone's locker was enough time for me to have that mindful moment of being able to ask myself do I really want to put this note in that person's locker. What students are missing today is that meta-moment, that opportunity to be mindful and to rethink what they're doing. But if they start to think about the kinds of things that are permanent, the kinds of things that should be private, what their personal data is, what communities they want to join, based on what the standards of those communities are, all of these different habits start to reinforce one another positively.
Michelle: Then, the third prong is productivity. Let's talk about that for a little bit.
Jackie: Sure. As our district went to a bring your own device model, there was a lot of concern about students being digitally distracted. We thought it was important that we included in our lessons on your cyberlife, how to self regulate and monitor your own device usage. How to recognize when the social aspect of a device might be interfering with the academic purpose for which you are engaged on that device at the moment. How to know how to turn one off at a time and how to know when to turn it all off for a little while and disengage from the digital world. We found some great people who have created short videos for students to help them practice some of these habits and develop some of these skills, and we'll include those in the resources for this episode.
Michelle: We talked about permanence and privacy and productivity. Let's add yet another P and talk about the profile. Where does it basically your digital profile live? In which of these or is it an all three?
Jackie: That's interesting, we ended up calling your profile your tattoo, and I know that there's another metaphor of the digital footprint out there; but footprints wash away, footprints erode and what you put online is permanent. We use the idea of your digital tattoo and we actually had students draw a tattoo, what might you be interested in having tattooed on you, and where would you put this? Would you put this where people would see it all the time, like on your ankle or on your forearm? Or would you maybe put this on your shoulder where not everybody would be able to see this all the time? How private would you want this to be? We used that metaphor as a way to have students start to think about how do I create for myself a public persona and a public reputation that is true to who I am and a positive representation of what I can do.
Michelle: Great. There's some tools to help along with this. We've talked a little bit about the videos, do you have any that you want to highlight or any programs you want to highlight?
Jackie: I particularly like Google's Be Internet Awesome program. I think it does a great job of reaching students in the elementary and middle school grades and their game that goes along with it to reinforce it is called Interland, and students really enjoy playing that. What I think is really excellent is Google having partnered with Harmony Labs to create an anti-cyberbullying curriculum geared right for high school students that's delivered entirely as a virtual reality experience but easily accessible with something as inexpensive as a Google Cardboard.
Michelle: Is there anything else? We talked a little bit about Citizen University, where "We promote and teach the art of powerful citizenship" is their tagline?
Jackie: Eric Lou's Citizen University is really a powerful organization. I first became aware of him through his TED Talk, where he was discussing the power of being civically literate and civically active, and I think that providing students that sense of agency is an important step in the digital citizenship process. They have to feel as though they are a part of a system and that they are powerful within that system, to also then become invested in how they are perceived by the other people in the system.
Michelle: Such a good point. Michael Wesch has done some great work on digital ethnography.
Jackie: I love Michael Wesch's work with his students at Kansas State University. In particular, I love his TED Talk where he discusses the fact that when media comes to a society, it permanently and irrevocably changes that society and that culture. Banning it and pushing back against it is not an effective way to address the impact media has on people.
Michelle: That's such an important message. Dana Boyd did a provocative keynote as South by Southwest in 2018, where she challenged us in many ways to rethink our whole approach to media literacy, so where does that fit into this?
Jackie: When Dana was talking about how we've actually maybe started to do a disservice making our students too critical of what they receive that now they discount everything. Anything can be called fake by anyone who claims to be practicing critical literacy habits.
Michelle: And conversely anything can be called truth, right?
Jackie: Exactly, and unfortunately, Dana is where we are, and that is still trying to figure out the best way to make students positive, active, responsible citizens.
Michelle: So skepticism might not be the disposition we're after?
Jackie: Or maybe it's just too much skepticism. I think we all need to work on this together.
Michelle: That leads us to our call to action.
Jackie: Literacy is citizenship, so this call to action is to help your students build a positive digital tattoo.
Michelle: Ask your students to collaborate, to create posts from your library or your classroom social media account and discuss the purpose of the information they're sharing, the best means for conveying it, and the appropriate hashtags to be sure it reaches the intended audience. Then guide them through understanding the expected behaviors in their social media communities. Remember to tweet us and we will respond at @MsJWhiting and @MLuhtala.
In this lesson, the three Ps of cyberlife are discussed. Read the SLC articles provided in the resources below and reflect on the lesson and how aware you are of your own personal digital citizenship and that of your students. Are you doing enough to provide students an understanding that there is a code of conduct in their cyberlife? Do they understand how to find their meta-moment before responding? After you have read the articles, complete the Reflect & Practice activity below.
After reflecting on the lesson and SLC articles provided, how well do your students understand the permanance of their digital footprint? Create an activity around social media and challenge your students to create one for an upcoming school event. How savvy are they with the language they use? Have they considered the three Ps in their post?
MLA Citation
"News Literacy: Code of Conduct in Your Cyberlife." School Library Connection, January 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2256631?learningModuleId=2256568&topicCenterId=2247905.
Entry ID: 2260850
Additional Resources
About the Authors
MLA Citation
Luhtala, Michelle, and Jacquelyn Whiting. "News Literacy. Literacy is Citizenship, Digital or Otherwise [12:39]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, January 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2256631?learningModuleId=2256568&topicCenterId=2247905.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2256631?learningModuleId=2256568&topicCenterId=2247905
Entry ID: 2256631