As the semester continues I’m hoping that I can give students more choice in blog prompts or that we might collaboratively come up with some blog prompts together. This week I am hinting at that by having two possible prompts that students can choose between.

Transition from High School to College

Next week we start #fyschat where we will be annotating a Washington Post article with hypothe.is. The article is about why good high school students are not necessarily good college students. I thought that having students reflect on their own experience of transitioning from high school to college would be a cool way to tie things into #fyschat and that they may even want to share their posts during the Twitter chat on the 25th.

However, a few weeks ago I had given student’s a wildcard prompt and let them blog about anything that they wanted and many of them chose to blog about just that. So, that would be pretty boring for those students. Hence my reasoning for coming up with two options.

Paideia

Being a first-year seminar this class is only half my design. Being an honors section puts on, even more, requirements to do certain assignments and use certain assessments. I don’t mind it at all. I actually think it is pretty awesome that we have a group of educators that are thinking about what all students should experience. I get a lot of freedom to put my own “digital citizenship” spin on things and I like thinking about ways to integrate things.

One of the assignments that everyone has to do is a “paideia essay”. The prompt is collectively written by the working group and it calls on students to personally reflect on some big questions. The questions center around what it means to be a college student at a liberal arts institution, what does the student feel called to do in terms of vocation, how does a liberal arts education fit into that, what does it mean to be an educated person, etc. It is also very practical as it asks questions about what the student will study and how they will study.

Another thing I did with one of the blog prompts in weeks past is that I based it on the prompt for the midterm paper. I did this to give students a way to write informally in public about the same topic that they would write about formally for the midterm. This gave them an opportunity to practice writing about those ideas on a public forum where I knew they would get feedback from each other (I do ask them to comment on each other’s posts) but they had a chance at getting some feedback from people that might read their posts.

So, the second option of the prompt is the informal paideia. Same as the assignment but on their blogs and written for the public.

I’m hoping that by giving some choice students will be able to pick a prompt that works for them. I’m hoping to get more creative with the prompts as we go along.

Cheers,

Autumm

Image Credit: By Flicker.com user “a4gpa” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/a4gpa/195354385/) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

For this week’s blog prompt I’ve asked my DigCiz students to write about hyperlinks. We discussed it and brainstormed it in class a little bit. I’m always harping on them to use more hyperlinks in their posts. I’m not sure they understand why I put them through this.

A part of it is the simple digital literacy of creating a hyperlink. Different systems do it differently and there could be a whole post just on how they are technically created in various environments. I’ve come to appreciate how I can highlight text in WordPress, with a URL waiting on the clipboard, paste it over the text and rather than the text disappearing and being replaced by the URL a hyperlink is created. Other systems don’t make it so easy. Some force you to use a WYSIWYG editor and for some others if you don’t know how to code the HTML you are out of luck.

There is, of course, the point about citation to be made when talking about hyperlinks. It is important to understand your influences and to be transparent about where ideas (and materials) are coming from. In a formal citation we make a notation in the text following a certain rules of style which then reference a list at the end of the paper or the page that give more information about how we can find that resource. The hyperlink is doing something very similar but in a much more compact format.

However, a big reason why I want students to think and write about hyperlinks is because I want to draw out a conversation about layers and connection in knowledge. This is the bigger conversation that I want to have. I’m not sure that all students will get it but I want to challenge all of them to consider it. We just finished reading Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article As We May Think where Bush envisions a machine that could trace the connections of knowledge. We did an improv exercise in class where we said the first word that came to our minds based on the word the previous person said. We are starting to explore how the pursuit of knowledge is a connected endeavor more so than a transactional one.

Of course there is the old game of “Hey look at me. I’m the professor and I have all the knowledge. Now I will give the knowledge to you and then you will give it back to me so that I can make sure you got it.” That is a thing and I don’t want to belittle it because there are tons of instances where that might be the best way to learn a thing. However, when we stop seeing knowledge acquisition as only possible via a transaction and we start seeing it in terms of connection then powerful things start happening. 

So, I’m hoping that students will consider different dimensions concerning hyperlinks. That they will do some searching on the different purposes around hyperlinks that are of interest to them, write about that, and of course link to the things that they found interesting. These next three weeks we are talking about environments and we will get into other ways of layering knowledge and connecting.

Image Credit by Xavier Gigandet et. al. [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Capital is a Lutheran school and so I talked with the students in the DigCiz class a bit about the Lutheran idea of vocation. I’m not Lutheran but I have worked at a Lutheran institution for almost nine years and I have attended Lutheran conferences where the idea of vocation was the focus. I didn’t really feel qualified to give an overview of the Lutheran idea of vocation so I let folks like Parker Palmer speak for me (even though he is Quaker I felt that he drove the point about purpose home) and threw in some Fredrick Buechner.

Even though I’m not Lutheran I feel drawn to this idea that the thing that a person does with their life is bigger than just acquiring a set of skills and collecting pay.

I think that one of the things that makes Capital, and other small Liberal Arts institutions, distinct is this focus on the whole person and life long learning. Yes one needs to learn skills but as markets fluctuate an ability to know oneself, what one is passionate about, and how one can best meet their needs but also serve the world – well that is big. Then we add in not just knowing one’s self but knowing how to articulate one’s digital self. It is going to be a process. We are not going to finish this lesson by the end of the DigCiz course. However, we can start.

If digital citizenship is about being a person on the web then how does one use the web in terms of their calling, their vocation, their career, their job?

There are a lot of warnings about putting information online that could be of a detriment to career prospects or even to current employment. This is an important point that cannot be overlooked. Different careers may have different limitations about what can be public and what needs to stay private. For instance, if in an educational or health care field in the United States, laws such as FERPA and HIPAA will come into play in terms of how much you can say about students or patients.

However, when considering any career there is a lot to be said for having a strong network. Digital and social media can help to build a network when used as a tool for learning. Most fields are shifting and changing at a rapid pace and being able to connect with others in a field to gain knowledge can be an important skill. A professional website can be a place to highlight achievements and a blog can give a glimpse into ones thinking over time. Using social media tools can of course act as a news feed but more importantly it can connect a person with others in their field who may have knowledge to share.

But it is a delicate balance.

How the public and private are juggled is going to differ depending on each person and the environment in which they find themselves.

For this next blog post prompt I’m asking students to consider a job, career, field, discipline, etc and then to think about how a digital identity fits into that world. Are there others in that field who are expressing themselves as digital identities now? How do they use the web in that field? What hashtags, if any, are being used to gather conversations in that arena on places like Twitter? What about LinkedIn and personal websites? However, I’m hoping that students don’t forget to notice what is not being said and why – is there a law prohibiting certain types of speech? If not a law a kind of professional courtesy? What does all this mean in terms of being a digital citizen? 

Image Credit CC-A  Joelle L “Facebook: Self-constructed digital identity and academic performance”

Context

Its Alive!

And by “alive” I mean public

And by “it” I mean my UC100H Digital Citizenship course. I mean the course itself in terms of the birth of this blog and in terms of all of the student blogs – yes for this class but also the personal websites that the students have made for themselves.

We are live and in the public – here we go.

1st prompt

So, what is DigCiz? This is the question that I’m posing to the students as a prompt for their first blog post.

It is not an easy question. There are many definitions out there and I know many professional academics that are still debating that question. If you google the term from here in the middle of Mid-West America you will get a bunch of definitions centered around K-12 U.S. education. That can be a helpful starting place but I can’t help but wonder what kind of example is being set for children by the digital citizens currently on the web.

In a nutshell when defining digital citizenship, I think about identity, then environments, and then interactions between identities and environments and between identities themselves. Just like “on the ground” or “in the flesh” citizenship I first consider that you have to be a person (and recognized as such); being a person online is what we call digital identity. I then consider how digital identity exists in an environment, that is, how environments dictate agency in terms of affordances. Finally, all the complexities around how our digital identity exists with other digital identities in various environments. On top of it all there is a tension, even in that broad definition, between the citizenry that we want, or even would idealize, and the citizenry that we live every day.

It is still early in the term and we have touched on digital identity and digital environments a bit but we are still getting started. I front loaded a tiny bit of all those things in the first few weeks of class. We read about Gardner Campbell’s vision of a personal cyberinfrastructure, we talked about ownership and if you could really own your own domain with Maha Bali, we spoke with Rebecca Hogue and considered the responsibility that we take on when we start talking about others in public, we explored privacy and security concerns on the web, and looked at how we can share our work with Creative Commons.

So what does it all mean? What is digital citizenship? Is it important to think about the way that we collectively share space on the web? How does one reflect themselves in a digital identity and why is that important? How will my students use their domains to create a digital identity for themselves and is that important to them? What rights and responsibilities do we all have to keep/make digital environments that contribute to the digital commons in a productive way? How do we interact with one another in positive meaningful ways online?

Till next time – Autumm

Image Credit: By Hopfare368 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons