Reflection: Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

 

          Standard 2 states that “students understand the social, ethical, legal, and human issues surrounding the use of technology in educational environments and use that understanding to guide their practices.” CI 608 social media course and especially the project Centering Whiteness in Social Media Narratives and It’s consequences for a Public Educational Institution Located in MidWest is the best representation for my understanding of this standard. For this assignment, we collected and analyzed 50 photos of the selected institutions’ Instagram accounts. Those photos told the story of the constraint of centering whiteness on their social media posts against the university’s mission. In addition, through the selected photos, it showed a lack of accessibility and activities for students of color as compared to white students. I chose this artifact because it helped me to understand identity and social issues more deeply.

          According to Mike Ribble, there are nine elements within digital citizenship including digital literacy, communication, access, security, etiquette, rights & responsibilities, commerce, law, health & wellness. This project focused on digital communication and digital rights and responsibilities. The process of observing and taking a deeper look into those Instagram photos helped me to build an analytical mindset. At first, it could be easy just to look at a picture and right away forget about it. However, this project helped me analyze patterns and see what is the deeper meaning of a post and what messages they want to deliver through the picture. In this case, this institution used the photos to recruit new students and showed what kinds of activities they are offering on campus. Since I did not have much background in quantitative analysis, it did take time to learn and try to interpret the information that makes sense to the audience. After this project, I began to understand how to analyze data from collecting pictures in a simple way.  This project also connected well with the lessons that we learned in class about identity, threats to democracy, media literacies, and free speech. For example, the majority of the photos that had people’s faces focused on white people. There are rarely pictures of people of color. As a result, it could be very harmful to the school mission of creating a diverse environment and opportunities for everyone. In those pictures, you could only see the majority identity is white. To apply what I have learned as a future educator, I want to pay more attention to how I choose an image for any assignment or lesson. Do I use the various sources of the author, do I pay attention to the core value of the school given, it is inclusive or exclusive? By doing that, I hope to create a more inclusive and diverse viewpoint and to make the knowledge universal than just for a certain group of students. As Greenhow and Gleason said, “ multimodality enables meaning to be distributed across different modes...multimodal texts can be interactive as users can “write back”, thus blending authorship, readership, production, and consumption.” (p. 467) More importantly, media literacies are a new way of understanding information and we need to have more understanding and knowledge about this area. 

          The social power issues mentioned in our project where 80% of the activities posted on  Instagram is for white students such as playing soccer, play music, giving speeches, graduation ceremony, and running while only 20% of students of color with activities such as posting the picture and play football. There was a big difference that indicates that what white students have many opportunities to explore and do lots of meaningful things like play, learn, deliver the speech as compared to color students are only focused on posing pictures. It showed that there is a conflict with the university’s mission to create diversity and an inclusive environment for all of its students. For me, it seems like there are many angles looking into those photos. Therefore, a careful understanding and learning about social media is a very important knowledge that needed to be foster for this generation teacher where all the technologies keep changing. There are many consequences that could come along with these issues including the lack of support in the school where students of color do not feel belonging to the school and could create distance in their friendship with white students, faculty, and staff. In addition, it could lead to racial harassment where white supremacy is presented. As a future educator, I want to create a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment for all the students. I know that a lot of teachers nowadays using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook to teach the lesson or assign the homework. By acknowledging whiteness problems and how pictures can mean lots of things, we can carefully choose what to post to meet the university mission. Afterward, we recommended that the university can include more students of color pictures doing a variety of activities to show that they commit to the university mission. It is interesting to look at the same account after two semesters. I can see that there are lots of changes on their Instagram page. They included more images of the students of color. However, their account still does not show the students who are wearing Hijab as compared to other's institution Instagram photos. There should be continuous changes and reevaluate on their social media page. My professor, my partner in this project, and I will have a presentation with the Diversity and Inclusion Department in this university to present about our project and address this issue. I hope it can help in making the difference on campus.

          As a future educator helping to promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility, I believe I should be a model first to advocate. Here are some essential activities I need to do such as citing proper citations for sources and images, thinking ways to connect, and helping students learn about things globally, ethically, equitably. Additionally, I want to teach students to understand local and global issues and responsibilities related to technology uses. For example, with this coronavirus where most of the schools in the United States decided to move the courses online to the rest of the Spring semester, there would be some accessibility issues where students don’t have access to the internet, or don’t have a subscription to software that is normally free when you are on campus. Taking about globally, Sri Lanka for example, students have to stay at home due to the COVID-19 but they cannot study like the majority of students in the US because they do not have access to the internet. In addition, it is important to teach students about digital literacy such as where is the trustworthy information to learn, having appropriate digital etiquette in their language of communication, and safety issues online. As my future job working for Veterinary Medicine as an instructional technologist specialist, this digital citizenship is very important for me to keep in mind and put it into practice in my daily work as to how to incorporate them into lessons and courses. I could see those elements of becoming digital citizenship can be planned in every part of the course such as in the syllabus which can be talking about digital security, and during the course where teachers can teach about digital literacy and digital etiquette.

           In summary, promoting and modeling digital citizenship is a very new study subject for me to keep learning and keep growing. There are so many new things needed to learn and update with the fast growth of technology. This project helped me to understand more about digital literacies, how images in posts on social media can mean a lot, and how to use the information correctly to convey our message to the audience.

 

References:

Greenhow, C., & Gleason, B. (2012, October). Twitteracy: Tweeting as a new literacy practice. In The Educational Forum (Vol. 76, No. 4, pp. 464-478). Taylor & Francis Group.

 

Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: Nine elements all students should know. International Society for Technology in Education.