Digital Citizenship

Society sets out rules of conduct and behaviour through the law. It can then layer other behavioural expectations through its rituals, customs and social mores. What do we do on the internet? Some of it is governed by law. We shall eventually get to a stage where there are an international set of agreed behaviours for digital citizenship. One of the interesting things is the internet can be very successful as a self regulating social entity. Other times it is epic fail on model cyber-citizenship. Schools and education departments tend to spell out their expectations as a matter of course these days and that is good because it promotes clarity and an explicit expectation of those who engage with education networks. It helps ,though, to have these things discussed and clarified on a regular basis as new software and tools come into use fairly frequently and different groups of students have a different approach to devices and their use. Te@chthought has a very good graphic to help promote clarity and understanding of what digital citizenship can and might mean. You can download it as a pdf from the site and then the site further explores what digital citizenship might look like in real terms.