Digiteen project on wikispaces
Barbara Stefanics, an ITGS teacher at Vienna International School, recently alerted me to a project her students are involved in with a number of their peers from Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia (US) and the Qatar Academy.
It’s called Digiteen and is a collaborative wiki project looking at Digital citizenship, which they define as “knowing how to behave appropriately and responsibly with regard to technology use”.
It involves approximately 50 students, who have contributed new media resources and their own thoughts around 9 topics identified by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey in their book, Digital Citizenship in Schools.
The students have collected together some great material and I encourage you to have a look some time and let them know what you think. I particularly like the Guidelines for Teens section at the bottom of each page.
If you’re reading this, Barbara, please pass on my congratulations to the students and colleagues for such an excellent initiative. I have a couple of related questions for you though. I was looking to see what the students thought of the Creative Commons movement, but couldn’t find any reference to it (unless I overlooked it, for which I apologise). But, what do you all think about Creative Commons and its tools for licensing intellectual property and their derivatives? Do you think the tools help digital citizens become more responsible in their use/sharing/remixing of content published by others? Is it something you would consider using yourselves in a blog or wiki for example? I’d love to know what you think.
Julie Lindsay
17 June 2008 at 12:08 pm
Hi Lee
Thanks for your kind words about our project. Can I also add that students and teachers collaborated via a Ning at http://digiteen.ning.com. Viewers will see real ‘professional’ networking as we have embedded it into the curriculum for this project.
Re Creative Commons….yes, this is something we have discussed but it may not have made it into the wiki as such. There certainly needs to be more awarenss of this.
Keep in mind also that one of the objectives for starting this project was to develop online skills and digital citizenship leading into stuednts then doing the Flat Classroom Project the following year. See http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com
Julie Lindsay
Qatar Academy
Barbara Stefanics
19 July 2008 at 2:54 pm
Dear Lee,
Aologies for the delayed response. June and July have been very hectic.
Your appreciation will be certainly be passed along to the students who worked on the Digiteen project. They learned mnay valuable lessons, but most important of all they learned that they CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE not only in our own school, but have a global impact as well.
The Digiteen rules for being a digital citizen were written by teens for teens. They were also published in the Parent Newsletter to seek the support of both parents and teacheres as well.
There are several spin-offs to this project. One is that we do need to make students, teachers and parents more aware of creative commons licensing both from observing the intellectual property rights of others as well as protecting their own work. We need to teach students how to correctly identify their work with cc licensing.
Through this project and ITGS, it has become apparent that we need to teach and observe digital citizenship throughout PYP, MYP and DP and develop appropriate programs for the students at the various age levels. Students need to grow up with digital values. It seems that there is alot of work to be done in this area. It is certainly one of my main interests and one where I feel we all can make a real difference.
I hope that through the digiteen project (http://digiteen.wikispaces.com) and your blog that other educators will join our efforts in supporting digital citizenship.
Best regards,
Barbara