Week #4 Digital Citizenship: What a Tangled Web We Weave

Flip through any baby catalog, and you will see all manner of products illustrating the lengths society goes to in the name of keeping our kids safe.

The Thudgaurd infant safety helmet

Sometimes these efforts can be a bit extreme or misguided, especially as our kids get older and the threats to their well-being grow more complicated than sharp coffee table edges and pieces of hot dog cut too large.

There is no disputing the fact that the digital age has brought with it new dangers and dilemmas for our children. In last week's class we discussed several of these dangers, from oversharing of personal information to child predators to cyberbullying. It's important as educators not just to be aware of these issues but to fully understand the nature of the problems, the severity of the threats and the potential solutions.

Take cyber predators. A much quoted 2006 ABC News report concluded that 1 in 5 children have been approached by an online predator. This statistic led many parents and educators to fixate on a threat that, when studied more thoroughly, turned out to be far less terrifying than many more common and insidious dangers facing our children. According to this excellent article on the PBS Teachers website, not a single one of these reported incidents led to any physical contact, and almost half of the solicitations came not from adults but from peers. We as educators should not ignore the possibility of such crimes being perpetrated on unsuspecting children in their own homes, but we should understand that it is a relatively rare threat in the digital arena.

After watching the two PBS articles assigned for last week's homework and discussing online safety in class, I am convinced that the most frightening characteristic of the new digital world is its ability to disseminate information so rapidly and so irretrievably. Kids are often "set loose" online at a very young age, and even those who are carefully supervised can quickly learn to get around safeguards and/or stumble into unsafe places. So what are we as educators to do?

Blogger Suzie Nestico makes an excellent argument here that teachers need to be tech savvy themselves if they want to help their students be good digital citizens. It's not enough to have a glancing familiarity with the tools and programs our kids are using, she says. We should, for instance, know our way around Facebook and be able to address problems that arise on social media sites quickly and effectively.

But it's not enough, either, just to understand technology and the dangers inherent in its various forms. We have to help kids understand that the online world is not an alternate universe where they can go and do whatever they wish, but a part of the world they live in. Cyberbullying, for example, is not a whole new problem facing young people: It's a very old problem in new packaging. As this article on ReadWriteWeb points out, cyberbullying is a social problem that can't be addressed merely with a tidy list of online do's and don't's. Teaching our students responsible use of the internet goes hand-in-hand with teaching them to be responsible citizens of our communities and of our world.