Is Higher Education Adequately Building Capacity To Foster “Digitial Citizenship”?


We are experiencing a digital hive-mind in these the early decades of the twenty-first century as manifested by the speed and spread of participatory cultures created by online user-generated content. Currently, this manifestation is being ideologically and commercially sold as a utopian vision unfolding with unquestioning certainty. However, are we sweeping away our familiar yesterdays in our rush to embrace global digital cultures? North American scholarship has adopted the rhetoric of “digital citizenship” as an umbrella term enfolding social participation that goes beyond just working with digital tools. This term’s ideological assumption echoes the tradition of democratic scholarship that leads us back to the social utopias of participatory democracy as expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837). Emerson, in this essay, outlined the scholar’s responsibility, as a member of democratic society, to participate in the betterment of society as a whole.  Echoes of Emerson resonate in the writings of John Dewey. By drawing education into the ambit of social constructivism, Dewey continually stressed that citizens construct their understanding of the world they live in by reflecting on their experiences of living within it. Arguably, this has shaped the scholarship of teaching and learning discourses.

Questions relating to the ethics emerging from the globalisation of the Internet are discussed in the Good Play Project originating as part of Project Zero within the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the United States. This on-going project aims to discover how young people, aged 15-25 years, are changing because of their engagement with digital media. Current findings show that far from being passive consumers or victims of new media, young people are actively contributing to and defining the new media landscape through their production of user-generated content. Of critical interest is the manner the Good Play Project engages with touchstones of digital citizenship. The project highlights five key issues at stake in global digital cultures: 1) identity; 2) privacy; 3) ownership; 4) authorship and credibility; 5) participation. The team proposes a model of good play by considering the following themes: 1) affordances of digital media; 2) technical and media literacy; 3) cognitive development; 4) online and offline peer culture; and 5) ethical supports, including the absence or presence of adult mentors in a manner that resembles the teacher-less classroom to promote autonomous learning. While the Good Play Project believes that young people are nurturing skill-sets through online collaboration, team members are currently asking: are digital youth developing a corresponding ethical sense regarding their online activities? A current transatlantic debate is “net neutrality”: how can rights of expression be balanced against freedom of access?   

It is worth remembering that the experience of technology is not neutral as it changes the rate and flow of information and by so doing it changes society in many imperceptible ways as futurist Paul Virilio has noted. Contemporary techno-culture is bringing persons into new networks of interconnection yet paradoxically weakening personal empathetic engagement. Educational constructivists, exemplifying the ideas of Emerson and Dewey, have made an important contribution to the definition of a liberal humanistic vision of the future. Their contribution lies in the fact that these educational philosophies keep alive the dream of a libertarian society in which humaneness moderates the calculus of production for profit. Progressive educators, like the Acorn School in London, have already started a journey that seeks to re-imagine the traditional values of citizenship in order to re-assess their application for digital culture. Educational constructivists challenge us to seek out ways to re-humanise our social systems. Education in a humanistic society will require explicit fostering of citizens motivated by co-operation, altruism and compassion instead of competition, hedonism and egotism alienated within silos of digital media.

Further Reading

Acorn School London [Online] Accessed on 29 October 2015 from
           http://thelondonacornschool.co.uk/.
John Armitage  “Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural    
        Theory” [Online] Accessed on 29 October 2015 from
        ‪http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133.
John Dewey (1916) Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of
           education. (New York: Macmillan Company) [Online] Accessed on 29 October
           ‪http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/dewey/cover.html.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837) “The American Scholar” [Online] Accessed on 29 October
          2015 from ‪http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm.
Good Play Project [Online] Accessed on 29 October 2015 from
          ‪http://www.thegoodproject.org/projects/good-play-project/.
Paul Virilio (2005) The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso).

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