On being and becoming responsible & caring digital citizens (part 1)

I’m working on a presentation that I proposed for Social Media: Connected Culture in May titled “on being and becoming responsible & caring digital citizens”. My initial idea was that I would talk about my experience with a pilot course I did with faculty on Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship (#digpins) as a way to talk about the importance of being aware of our participation and responsibility in digital spaces as digital citizens particularly in the higher education landscape. I would like this to be a conversation at the conference, as those who I know of that are attending are completely out of my regular or associated networks and I find that it is often more productive to have some context to start a conversation at a conference session, as opposed to seeing a polished snapshot of that thing being done in a that certain environment.

In between writing my proposal and then facilitating the #digpins course, my own exploration of engaging in online communities talking about the human in the digital, networked learning, opening up traditional learning experiences, got me involved in conversations directly about digital citizenship or #digciz chats. This was a happily found collaboration with Autumm Caines who was/is working on a first year student seminar on digital citizenship. These were open, smallish (at times intimate, at times awkward) video and Twitter chats touching on #digciz in higher ed with weekly focuses or themes. Different people jumped into the various conversations at different points from their contexts and opened up what I would have mulled over in the stew of my own thoughts alone, most likely encountering a wall.

Now I’m at a point where I need to better connect and articulate the connections between these two experiences, as well as hand in my draft for the before said conference. I thought I would do what I’ve seen others do and have suggested: use this open, transparent (although somewhat controlled by my still delicate expression of digital identity) to draft. This may be where my “Part 1” ends, and this now also becomes an experiment in my editing process when I use an open draft format.