Digital Citizenship, Open Educational Resources (OER), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and You!
byWilliam Kenyon-
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The concept of digital citizenship started around the later 1990's as the internet became more accessible and mainstream, quickly becoming a part of daily life for millions across the globe (The Definition of Digital Citizenship, 2020). While the term has seen frequent use for the greater part of two decades, no one person owns the term, and the definition slightly varies from academic to academic. Simply put, digital citizenship is an umbrella term. The Digital Citizenship website defines digital citizenship today as "the continuously developing norms of appropriate, responsible, and empowered technology use" (Nine Elements: Nine Themes of Digital Citizenship, n.d.).
The nine elements of digital citizenship are as follows: (Nine Elements: Nine Themes of Digital Citizenship, n.d.)
Digital Access: The ability for people to connect, access, and utilize information in technology.
Digital Commerce: Understanding how to responsibility purchase technology and utilize technology in the shopping and purchasing process.
Digital Communication and Collaboration: A set of communication skills that a person utilizes when communicating online. Understanding the purpose of a software or platform, and being conscious of how a person presents themselves online and on the platform being utilized, all fall under this umbrella.
Digital Etiquette: How a person treats others online. It is important to understand that every person you interact with is a living, breathing, human, and that we should be respectful and polite online just like we would be in person.
Digital Fluency: The ability for a person to understand technology, use technology, and find information with technology.
Digital Health and Welfare: This element of digital citizenship focuses on the mental and physical wellbeing of the person. Having good habits such as posture for example is important. Additionally, making time to get away from the technology is equally important for both physical and mental health.
Digital Law: Understanding basic law and how not to break the law online. This can range from copyright distribution, to more serious issues such as cyberbullying.
Digital Rights and Responsibility: Understanding that the internet affords people unparalleled levels of free speech as the internet provides a blanket of anonymity to each user. It is important not to impede on the privacy or rights of others, and to be conscious of where that line needs to be drawn.
Digital Security and Privacy: A set of skills/fluency that a person possesses in regards to online threats. Threats can range from malware or computer viruses, to hacker and identity theft attempts from other malicious online users. The ability to recognize red flags and avoid them in regards to digital security and privacy is the tenant of this digital citizenship element.
My personal definition of digital citizenship is as follows: Digital citizenship is a basic set of technological skills and competencies that allow for people to participate in – and be productive in – basic daily living and productivity tasks that involve technology. Segueing into the two tenants of digital citizenship that are critically important to me personally, let's have a chat about digital access and digital law, and how open educational resources (OER) allows an educator to masterfully incorporate these two tenants of digital citizenship into a curriculum.
It is important not to share copyrighted content online, no matter the intention, as doing so is illegal and in many cases, can directly impact the producer/owner of the content; be it an online classroom, or Facebook, the law is still the same in this regard. So as an instructional designer, I make frequent use of OER Commons and royalty free media to make sure I do not infringe. On a side note, in this very blog, I make frequent use of Pixabay for my multimedia imagery; Pixabay is a royalty free image platform that anyone can freely use.
As an instructional designer, I am a huge proponent of OER content for a variety of reasons. From a pedagogical standpoint, OER content is digitally accessible. A person can access OER content from a computer, a phone, a tablet, or pretty much any modern connected device with the click of a URL and nothing more. This is often not the case when utilizing technology that is copyrighted, which can come with many barriers -- financial or otherwise -- that directly impede the learning experience for the student. And removing barriers to learning is critical to the learning experience; in an online learning environment, technology can just as quickly become a barrier as it can be a bridge. Removing barriers to learning is actually the hallmark tenant of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) pedagogy ideology.
In short, UDL is a set of learning concepts developed by CAST that provides all students with an equal opportunity to learn. The goal of UDL is to adjust the learning process to the learner, rather than force the learner to adjust to the teaching and curriculum of the teacher. The aim of the UDL framework is to reduce barriers to learning by representing content in various mediums, utilizing systems and processes that allows students to take ownership of the learning based on how the student learns, absorbs, and interprets.
Here is a great video that talks more about UDL that goes further into the UDL ideology:
Because of how openly accessible OER content is, the utilization of OER content is also a great platform from a curriculum design standpoint. By utilizing various open medias, an instructor can quickly update curriculums on the fly to be modern and relevant, without needing to completely redevelop a course or curriculum, keeping the learning experience current and in the moment at all times. This is often not the case when a traditional, costly textbook is utilized in the learning experience, as once a new edition of the textbook is released, the entire curriculum often needs to be redesigned because of the changes made in newest release. And just as bad, sometimes a new edition is never produced, potentially allowing for the learning material to become outdated.
There are so many benefits to using OER materials that completely compliment the digital citizenship themes of digital access and digital law. Many textbook platforms use confusing, digital third party platforms to access their copyrighted material, removing the control over the learning experience that the instructor could otherwise have. These third party resources can be confusing for students to navigate, forming a barrier to the learning experience as the student struggles to access the content. And just as bad, instructors can accidently find themselves violating copyright laws by distributing material from these textbooks to their students to help remove those very barriers and be none-the-wiser, until a costly copyright lawsuit hits their institution. And lastly, by utilizing various OER resources instead of just one platform or textbook, students get a variety of viewpoints and angles on a subject, reducing potential bias or information and topic gaps by offering different viewpoints from the various different medias.
Digital citizenship is an umbrella term that has nine elements. But each of those nine elements make up so much more and branch out into so many different directions as I just illustrated in my discussion about digital accessibility and digital law. At the end of the day, digital citizenship is a basic set of technological skills and competencies that allow for people to participate in – and be productive in – basic daily living and productivity tasks that involve technology. Having these skills and competencies will dramatically impact how a person is able to live in today's connected world, where the division between our personal, educational, and professional lives are all becoming intertwined and less segregated than ever before.
