you check yours in the last hour? How about your email? Maybe you’ve updated your Facebook status or pinned something today? Are you following us on Twitter (@leecrockett and @achurches)? How are those LinkedIn connections doing? Have you texted anyone, checked your steps, looked at the weather, watched a video, played a game, logged your workout, recorded your food, or spent time searching for a productivity app that will help you get on top of your life?
People with smartphones and a data plan now hold access to the sum total of human knowledge and history in the palms of their hands. ScienceDaily reports that 90 percent of all online data in the world was generated between 2011 and 2013 (SINTEF, 2013). In light of this, is it any wonder our education institutions are grappling with how to affirm their purpose? It used to be that when someone posed a question in a social situation, discourse ensued, opinions and assumptions flew, and everyone was engaged in rich dialogue. Now it seems that the inevitable outcome of asking a question in a group will be the competition to see who can look it up fastest, followed by blank looks at each other with nothing left to talk about, and then everyone looking back to his or her phones for some sort of stimulation. Someone once told Lee the story of how, in this setting, as he grabbed his phone to verify his position, someone reached across and gently covered his phone and asked, “Would it be all right if, for just a little while, we didn’t know and could just wonder about it?” Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we all gave ourselves permission to wonder instead of know? Just for a few moments? Imagine the possibilities that could arise from being curious.
In February 2017, Facebook projected it would cross two billion monthly active users by mid-year (Popper & Erlick, 2017), which it did (Welch, 2017)—and Facebook is only one of hundreds of social networking opportunities. We have never been more connected than we are today, and yet for so many, we have never felt more alone. The Nike run app will stream your running route to your Facebook wall in real time, and your friends can cheer you on—literally. They click a button on your post, and you hear a crowd roaring on your phone with a message saying who cheered you on. This is really cool, but most people would rather their friends were with them on the run—that they were talking to each other, changing the pace and the route, and encouraging each other at the moment they actually needed it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And, no, you don’t have to give up your modern-day conveniences. Yes, devices can keep people distracted and isolated from engaging fully in life, but they also can be tools to help us to learn from each other and to change the world. It’s a question of how we use them. It’s a question of global digital citizenship.
Technology provides some of the biggest teachable moments ever. Through this book, we will share what we’ve learned through our experiences working with hundreds of schools around the world. We will help you transform acceptable use policies, restrictions, and outright bans to a system of cultivating respect and responsibility for oneself, others, and everything around us. We will show you how to expand the process to grow responsible, ethical, global citizens in a digital world.
Digital Citizenship Versus Global Digital Citizenship
When Internet-connected technology first started to appear in schools, educators quickly realized the need for guidelines for acceptable use of that technology. This most often resulted in restrictive acceptable use policies that often didn’t serve students’ needs or guide behavior outside the classroom. In this book, we discuss the limitations of these policies, which are primarily a list of rules and regulations rather than a guiding set of principles students can live throughout their lives.
Digital citizenship describes how a person should behave in the online world. Frequently, when schools create policies and programs around digital citizenship, they are primarily the content of an acceptable use policy enhanced with an educational component that focuses heavily on protecting students from online predation and cyberbullying.
Global citizenship is a well-understood concept relating to how one participates in and contributes to the world as a whole. What then is global digital citizenship, and how does it connect online behavior to one’s participation in the global community?
Since 2000, we’ve experienced the creation, expansion, and assimilation of the digital world. Before, there was the digital world, which was accessible to a limited demographic, and the physical world, in which we all lived. Through the rapid expansion of wired and wireless data, combined with the explosion of devices capable of connecting us to this network, we live in a new reality that contains both the digital and the physical worlds. Digital, connected technology is as much a part of our daily lives as the microwave and refrigerator, which are now also connected to the Internet.
As the digital world is part of our world, digital citizenship is a component of global citizenship, and is in fact only one of the facets of global digital citizenship that we discuss in this book. It does, however, have the capacity for a tremendous impact on who we are as members of the global community.
Therefore, global digital citizenship addresses how we participate and contribute in the blended physical and digital worlds, and how we can leverage the digital world to grow citizens in this new reality. Indeed, we dedicate the work of an entire foundation to this fundamental goal.
Global Digital Citizen Foundation
This book is a natural extension of our Global Digital Citizen Foundation (https://globaldigitalcitizen.org). You see, we have a strong commitment to be leaders in the global transformation of education. Our focus has always been in moving beyond the curriculum content and capitalizing on the opportunity to utilize education to allow children to develop and thrive as whole beings. Indeed, this was always an objective of education, but its focus on standardized testing of content led to content-focused teaching. It left to chance the development of important life skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, and compassion.
As a way to address curriculum while ensuring the development of valuable life skills, we developed what we call the essential fluencies, which we outline in our book, Mindful Assessment (Crockett & Churches, 2017). We see the emerging importance of developing and evaluating these life skills in the shift toward competency-based curricula that we see in several countries, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.
We founded the Global Digital Citizen Foundation with the hope that this work would grow beyond us as authors—that the work of the essential fluencies would grow to empower students to strive together to solve problems that matter and create bright futures for all beings. To that end, we are actively seeking organizations and professionals who share our vision and want to contribute to and expand our vision. We hope that this book will inspire you to work with us to help develop a generation of students into exemplars of global digital citizenship.
Structure of This Book
This book, which we wrote primarily for K–12 educators and administrators, consists of seven chapters on global digital citizenship and three appendices with reproducible resources you can use to support your students. Each chapter ends with a Guiding Questions section to gauge your learning and progress.
We begin chapter 1 with a look at how to evaluate your school’s existing acceptable technology use policies and how to update them to reflect the values of global digital citizenship. From forming an advance team to establish the policy’s purpose, clarity, and rationale, to creating effective strategies for implementing and supporting it, this chapter lets you hit the ground running.
Chapter 2 discusses the essential traits of the global digital citizen. How can we best develop a student’s sense of personal responsibility? How do we teach students to be both good digital and global citizens? What practices
