Digital Citizenship

Previously, citizenship and crediting sources was not so complicated. If you saw something that you liked and wanted to share or use, you could ask them for permission to use it. Granted, there was not such high stakes for not crediting sources, nor were there ways to always know if a source was attributed to its original owner. This started the ball rolling with patents, copyright laws, and Creative Commons. With the rise of the Internet, it is now easier to share and collaborate with others, but with that comes a responsibility to be a good digital citizen and more repercussions for those who don't practice safe copyright habits.
 
6 Copyright Do's & Don't for Teachers
 
Even now, digital citizenship is similar to citizenship outside of the use of technology. We are still expected to give credit to sources when we use them on the web just like any other source. There are high penalties for forgetting that responsibility - and some of the scariest for those who choose to completely ignore it. Take the Clark County school district (linked on the Canva information graphic) for example. Administrators from this district uploaded an entire book to the Internet for everyone to use; all pages except for the copyright pages were included. If that isn't blatant copyright infringement, I don't know what is. And we know these penalties are real from the horror stories of students who copy entire essays from online and turn them in to their professor, only to be put on academic probation and given an F for the class.
 
It does seem a lot easier to forget about crediting a small source you find on the Internet rather than from a book. This is a big difference between digital citizenship and other forms. Google Images can perhaps be the worst for fooling people into thinking the images are a free for all. And all photography uploaded to the Internet, for that matter, can be used and reused without crediting the source. But we all know it's different when you're staring at a book in the library. We all know to credit that source, but what about the picture we decided to embed into our blog? In this way, a lot flies through the cracks in the realm of crediting Internet sources.


 
As a teacher, it will be important for me to educate my students not only about traditional citizenship, but citizenship on the web as well. For this, the important thing to remember is responsibility is key.  Allowing students to share their work with others in the class and attributing their sources can also teach them what that responsibility looks like, and also what it feels like when someone wants to use your work. We could also address pre-Internet stories of citizenship (whether positive outcomes or negative) and talk about how those outcomes were reached. Were the outcomes fair? How would you feel if you worked hard for something and weren't given credit for it?

One of the biggest ways (and honestly my job as the teacher) is to aid in this learning by setting an example for my students. I will need to cite all my sources properly to show them what responsibility looks like. This is for all different kinds of responsibility. Sometimes citizenship is built by addressing others' feelings and opinions on the matter. Hopefully my students will lead others by example and grow to be strong digital citizens!