Be A Good Digital Citizen – Page Draft

Consider these questions as you review the video and related links below. Try the quiz from the left menu: What Have You Learned? after you’ve spent some time with this section.

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We are living part of our lives online everyday. We are experimenting and learning how to participate in networks where online etiquette is in the eye of the beholder. And just as we are figuring out who we are and who we want to be offline, we are doing the same thing online. Being authentic takes courage and sometimes (in the process of working up to it) we try on some “personas” that have unintended consequences. The video below showcases common social media blunders and online personality types that are derived from the use of these social bad habits.

Digital Tattoo Project: Think Before You Ink Series

Whether we’re more outgoing, less polite or bolder in our social assertions, we tend to present our digital personas differently than we present ourselves in our offline lives. (not sure that the first sentence is needed?) Remember that, for better or worse, when we put something out there in public and online, we will be judged. But we also have the opportunity to contribute in a way that builds trust and reputation. Would you trust someone who wasn’t being themselves? When we participate, we have an obligation to consider the wider community and networks to which we belong. This means being authentic, taking responsibility for what we say online, considering the impact of our words on others, and giving credit to the works of others that we build on and mash up to create our own. It also means using our voices to organize, create awareness and take action in a public forum on issues that we think are important.

The online community is as much a community as the ones we participate in our offline lives. We have a responsibility to treat others with respect and kindness as we wish to be treated. By establishing ourselves as part of a community, we are obligated to help out our friends and those around us who are in need, just as we would in our regular day to day lives. We should always take time to actively reflect upon how we wish to be perceived by our peers, and how we are going to create positive and genuine impacts in our online and offline communities alike.

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The following 5 Tips are from Common Sense Media

• Think before you post or text — a bad reputation could be just a click away. Before you press the “send” button, imagine the last person in the world that you’d want seeing what you post.
• What goes around comes around. If you want your privacy respected, respect others’ privacy. Posting an embarrassing photo or forwarding a friend’s private text without asking can cause unintended hurt or damage to others.
• Spread heart, not hurt. If you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t say it online. Stand up for those who are bullied or harassed, and let them know that you’re there for them.
• Give and get credit. We’re all proud of what we create. Illegal downloading, digital cheating, and cutting and pasting other people’s stuff may be easy, but that doesn’t make it right. You have the responsibility to respect other people’s creative work — and the right to have your own work respected.
• Make this a world you want to live in. Spread the good stuff. Create, share, tag, comment, and contribute to the online world in positive ways.

Digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of appropriate and responsible behavior with regard to technology use. The challenge is, each community defines (for itself) its own norms. For an in depth look at examples of digital citizenship, .ORG has a great video out called Digital Citizen – a bit long for our site but definitely worth a closer look!

Learn more about nine themes of digital citizenship – many of which we highlight on this site.

What have you learned in this section? Take the quiz: