Creating Conscious Creators of Content (The New 4 C's?)

After finishing lol ... OMG!, I recognize a lot of my students' behaviors in the cautionary tales Ivester relates. Many of them have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook, and I wonder how carefully they have considered who they friend and what kind of content they allow those "friends" to see. I think it would be a great activity to have students access their list of friends on Facebook and sort them into the categories suggested by Ivester (friends, family, professional contacts, acquaintances), then show them how to limit access to certain types of content to protect their information. A good guiding question could be, "Does everyone need to know everything about you?" Many students complain that people are "all up in their business" without realizing that they share way more than they might normally feel comfortable with. They also may not realize how easy it is for your "friends" on Facebook to share your content that you think is private with a much larger audience than you anticipated. As an activity to address this, I would ask my students to become critical readers of Facebook, reading through the posts one night and cataloging how much content they can see from friends of friends (i.e. a person they are not "friends" with on Facebook, but is "friends" with one of their "friends"). I think this would be an eye-opening experience for many students.

I was really struck by the final two chapters of this book in its description of the evolving nature of the digital world. In some ways it seems kind of fixed to me, but I forget that the web is still in its teenage stages and hasn't fully developed as a mature space. In a way, it's very similar to a developing country and the social and cultural norms of this "country" haven't yet been decided. I was reminded of the research we did for our digital citizenship project about how social influence can impact online behavior. The power is truly in our students' hands to make the digital community a safe one for themselves and their peers by minimizing negative online social interactions and deciding on acceptable norms for interaction. I think it would be interesting to have our students draft a Digital Constitution describing the rights and responsibilities of digital citizens. It would be a great way to incorporate standards from Social Studies and the NETS for Students, generating a product that can be shared with the digital community. If this constitution is developed by students, perhaps more young people will embrace the principles and become more conscious creators of online content.