On Saturday, I had the wonderful opportunity of leading a workshop on Digital Citizenship at the National Liberty Museum here in Philadelphia. One of the most important conversations to have at the start of the day is about the meaning and importance of citizenship in general. We spent the morning coming up with a common understanding of citizenship and why it matters. This conversation provided us with a place to hang new information on various aspects of our digital lives and to put our digital lives in perspective.
I was inspired by the conversation and the deep thinking that went into the definitions the participants created.
What we discovered was that there are a lot of parallels between face to face citizenship and digital citizenship, though the biggest differences are based upon the tools we use to communicate.
You can read the various definitions created by the participants and make the comparisons yourself between analog and digital citizenship.
After we pulled some common themes from these definitions, we were able to refer to them throughout the day. Many participants reflected that this kind of conversation was something that they could easily do with their own students.
After a brief ‘gallery walk,’ the participants used stickers to vote on the definition that spoke to them the most as well as the sentence describing why citizenship matters. 