Sunday, February 12, 2012

Digital Ethics - Exploring how kids use Digital Media

I attended an interesting workshop about digital ethics, given by Katie Davis, a youth and digital media scholar based at Harvard Project Zero. I am always searching for digital citizenship resources that acknowledge the positives of student use of social media and don't try to scare the pants off of kids. Katie presented a very interesting perspective and posed some great questions for discussion with students. Her work is part of the Good Work Project, where you can find an extensive unit for use with High School students. I'm hoping to work some of this into my curriculum next year.

I struggle with fitting this kind of instruction into our school day. We don't have a computer class built into our schedule. How are you teaching digital ethics? Do you have any good resources to share?

5 comments:

Jenifer Stovall said...

Hello! My name is Jeni Stovall and I am a student in Dr. Strange's EDM310 class at the University of South Alabama. I found your post very attention catching, but would have liked to see a bit more information about the workshop itself so that maybe I could one day use it in my own classroom.
I will be doing a post on your blog on my own class blog and encourage you to check it out at the following URL: stovalljeniedm310.blogspot.com

Liz B Davis said...

In the workshop we went through several of the exercises that you can find on the Good Work Project website. If you check those out you will definitely be able to use them in your own classroom someday.

Katie said...

Thanks for blogging about my workshop, Liz! I'm glad you found it useful. Keep me posted about how you end up using the ideas and materials.

Jeni, you can find the Common Sense Media digital literacy and citizenship curriculum (informed by our research on the GoodPlay Project) here: www.commonsensemedia.org/educators

And you can find the high school curricular materials that our research group created in collaboration with Henry Jenkins' group here: www.goodworkproject.org/practice/our-space/

Katie

Aditi Rao said...

Hi! My name is Aditi Rao, and recently on my blog I posted the Educational Technology Bill of Rights by Brad Flickinger that might be interesting to you. I myself find them to be comprehensive and true to a lot of what students have told me they feel about their instructors and educational technology, but I am interested to hear your thoughts! Check it out here; http://teachbytes.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/educational-technology-bill-of-rights-for-students/

Ashley said...

I'm so glad I found this! Have you ever heard of the book INTERNET AND COMPUTER ETHICS FOR KIDS by Winn Schwartau? it was published in 2001, but he is currently rewriting/updating it and we are completely revamping the design of the book and making it more modern. We have a kickstarter trying to raise money to get it published and we're going to be offering some neat resources you should totally check us out. If you Like us on Facebook you can stay updated on our progress but this is definitely the kind of resource that teachers could use in classrooms that will NOT scare kids and that focuses more on giving kids the facts and then posing questions for their teachers/parents to discuss with them. The new version of the book is called CYBER SAFETY AND ETHICS AND STUFF. :) http://www.facebook.com/CyberSafetyEthicsStuff