Education and digital citizenship

For the last few Boot Camps I've made a passing mention of "digital citizenship" just to ask the question of whether or not we are addressing it sufficiently in higher education. The example I always use is to ask the question of whether or not our students are prepared to vote on questions having to do with electronic voting machines. It's a question as pertinent to the operation of democracy in our country as any in these times, and yet I can't seem to sell it as a pressing educational topic.

Yesterday I was surprised to hear an entire issue of the news program "On Point" address questions of cyberattacks and possible military responses. A little Googling and I found out at least one of the reasons why this topic bubbled to a head yesterday: Lockheed Martin suffered from a cyber-attack, and obviously that is a defense contractor of the first order. While several outlets are reporting that the attackers came up empty, others are also reporting that nonetheless the U.S. is quickly moving to consider cyber-attacks "acts of war" and deciding how and when to respond and in what fashion.

There is no clearer example of what it means to be a citizen of a 21st century nation.

And on NPR, where the story I first heard is available as a podcast, the very first of the 46 comments says "How can anyone listen to this program and have any trust in our elections where the vote counting is done in secret on electronic voting machines?"

There are a number of topics that comprise "Digital Citizenship" and hopefully some of them, at least, are going to be addressed in K-12 educational environments going forward. But are we sure we're graduating students who are at least aware these topics exist? And if we're not, how can we possibly integrate these issues into a curriculum that's already overloaded in our limited time with our students?

Some of you know what I'm going to say: we are going to have to give up something to get something else. It may very well be that we need to cut one lesson or unit from our syllabus to tackle digital citizenship questions somewhere in that same syllabus. But I suspect that we're already teaching a lot of topics that touch on these issues. It's not hard (using this particular topic list) to imagine the writing class that at least mentions digital literacy, the political science class that touches on digital rights and responsibilities or digital access (Arab Spring, anyone?), the legal studies class that addresses digital etiquette, or the economics or business class that includes digital communication as well as digital commerce. It may also be that we just need to consciously highlight those places in our curriculum where we're discussing what are for our faculty often very new topics, and make it clear that there are many open questions to be addressed.

And while I never advocate doing an exercise using electronic tools only once, it may be that doing one exercise in the course of the class on a digital citizenship topic is enough. Somewhere in our various curricula we do need to at least address these various topics.