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It’s All About Community

Were Aristotle were around today, I doubt he would be surprised by the amount of time young people spend with their digital devices.

In 350 BC he wrote, “man is by nature a social animal,” and since then nothing much has changed except that a large portion of our social bonding now takes place online, and many of us find ourselves members of new and different communities.

What has changed, however, is that the consequences of being a thoughtless community member today can be dire.

For example, take the UCLA student who made headlines last year for posting a video in which she complained about the Asian students in her school community. Backlash from the video, which immediately went viral, led to her eventual withdrawal from school. In addition, her very public actions as an insensitive member of her community will be memorialized in cyberspace forever.

I couldn’t help but think about this poor girl while teaching a lesson from Common Sense Media called “The Rings of Responsibility” to my 6th grade “Cyber Civics” class at Journey School.

This “digital citizenship” lesson asks students to think about the rights and responsibilities that come with being a member of a community. It teaches them that community members have responsibilities to three entities:

1. Themselves
2. Their friends and family
3. The larger community

The above holds true whether our community is online or offline. Responsibility and respect know no digital boundaries.

This lesson also asks students to think about the things that can cause a community to break down. My class came up with the following list: meanness, gossip, lies, exclusion, and pretending to be something/someone you aren’t. It was a good lesson (for me!), and I came home determined to be a kinder, more thoughtful member of all my communities.

In Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the Good Play Project (2008), James, et al, write about the vital role that mentors play “in teaching young people to view themselves as participants who do not simply use media, but shape it” (p, 42).

This is an important point. Adults often assume that because young people are so technically adept they must not need our help or guidance. But nothing could be farther from the truth. More than ever young people need adult support to learn how to be responsible citizens of all the new and different communities they belong (and will belong) to. Our mission at CyberWise is to help adults get up to speed on the digital world so that we can be the mentors that young people need.

What if the UCLA student had participated in a digital citizenship lesson like “The Rings of Responsibility” when she was in 6th grade? Would she have stopped to consider the responsibilities she had to her community (let alone herself) before posting the video?  Although we’ll never know what her fate may have been, perhaps with a little thoughtful guidance, we can help other young people avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

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Diana Graber is Co-Founder of CyberWise, a Digital Hub that helps busy adults understand and use digital tools to enhance learning. Diana also teachers CyberCivics at Journey School in Aliso Viejo, CA, and is the recent recipient of and M.A. in Media Psychology and Social Change from Fielding Graduate University. Photo Credit: Sujin Jetkasettakorn via Flickr and “Rings of Responsibility” from Common Sense Media.

Categories: Digital Citizenship, Educational Issues

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