• Introduction:
  • Name and a little about me
  • Course: EDCI 572 with Dr. Verena Roberts D
    • Development and Implementation of the Curriculum in Digital Learning Contexts
  • Overview: Digital Citizenship: Developing & Designing for Safe Learning Spaces

• Outline:
  • How does a safe learning space influence student learning?
  • How can educators ensure student privacy and safety is considered in digital environments?
  • How does your project consider individual student digital identity, safety and choice while encouraging individual cultures and perspectives?
  • Tech of the week

• How does a safe learning space influence student learning?
  • Kral and Schwab note in Design Principles in Indigenous Learning Spaces that a library, or similar community center, offer indigenous folks a safe place to go for all ages. It offers a place for kids to go and play games and on computers, a place for students and adults to read and research, and place for child minders and mothers to bring kids to learn and play. Libraries also offer a weather-controlled atmosphere where there are set rules that everyone follows to keep the place clean and safe (2012). Furthermore, libraries and community centers offer technology that some indigenous communities may not have access to at home.
  • Online tech has made access to some technologies more readily available to indigenous communities where there use to be gatekeepers in the past, creating a level of empowerment. For example, movie editing equipment being used by indigenous youth to tell stories and music recording and editing tech to create music and express themselves through it
  • These resources offer indigenous people an opportunity to try things out that they could not in the past and “muck around” as Kral and Schwab refer to it (2012), effectively working through the design process to create something through trial and error and learning from their mistakes as they go.
  • Some indigenous community centers, as outlined by Kral and Schwab, have taken to allowing the users to make the rules. This has given them a greater ownership of the building and its contents and made it their space rather than a space they can be in (2012).
  • Having personalized digital methods of communications allows students a safe way to communicate with friends and peers in a new way using text, image, and video (Kral and Schwab, 2012). This allows for a quick way to share information with others in a personalized manner that is fun and engaging. Furthermore, the combination of text, image, and video offers a way for indigenous youth to share their culture and fight prejudices by making their own or riffing on materials/messages.
  • Indigenous youth are offered a place to work between old cultural knowledge and marrying it with current technologies to expand culture and address it in a new contemporary lens (Kral and Schwab, 2012). This affords them the opportunity to tell their story rather than have it told by others.

• How can educators ensure student privacy and safety is considered in digital environments?
  • Privacy and limiting the acquirement of student data and information is extremely important in public education. It can potentially lead to many concerning ends, such as opening a student to racism, bigotry, and other forms of discrimination. Furthermore, it can potentially rob a student of their autonomy if the gathered information is used to guide an individual’s education as asserted by Regan and Jesse in Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking (2019).
  • Use district approved edtech
  • Parents and students need to know what information is being taken by websites and programs.
  • Follow Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) Guidelines. FOIPPA governs how public bodies, such as schools, collect and use personal information and holds them accountable. This means that as educators we need to know where our students’ information is being stored and make sure it is not in danger of being collected by other, potentially harmful, entities (FOIPPA, 2020).
  • Projects can be shared in class, instead of online, in order to allow all students to participate with the community of the project, giving feedback and receiving critiques. Also, a teacher could provide students with multiple options for both public (Twitter) and private (closed Facebook group or FreshGrade) online interactions which will afford students the opportunity to become more comfortable with online interactions and allow them to practice online networking/interactions before sharing with a wider open audience (Couros and Hildebrandt, 2016).
• How does your project consider individual student digital identity, safety and choice while encouraging individual cultures and perspectives?
  • Students are given the chance to record themselves as they see fit to document their progress in their project. This offers them an autonomy to talk about whatever they would like to and present it in a way that is relevant and personal to them.
  • Students will be provided with websites, apps / software, and other digital tools that have been cleared that meet FOIPPA standards and have been “okayed” with by parents and administration. Alternative methods would be provided for students who wish for them.
  • Lessons will be given discussing students’ online footprint and how a young student should share and behave online. Personal information should be shared with heavy limits and any online interactions with strangers should be kept to a minimum.
• Tech of the Week:
  • Eraser
    • Security & Privacy Software
    • Completely removes sensitive data from your computer
    • Mainly Windows applicable
  • Outro
    • Music: Canada by Picture of the Floating World

References & Readings:

Couros, A., & Hildebrandt, K. (2016). Designing for open and social learning. In G. Veletsianos (Ed.), Emergence and innovation in digital learning: Foundations and applications. Edmonton, Canada: AU Press. Retrieved from: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120258

Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. (1996). Retrieved March 21, 2020, from http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96165_00

Kral, I. & Schwab, R.G. (2012). Chapter 4: Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Spaces. Safe Learning Spaces. Youth, Literacy and New Media in Remote Indigenous Australia. ANU Press.http://doi.org/10.22459/LS.08.2012  Retrieved from: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/learning-spaces%EF%BB%BF

Regan, P., & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. DOI: 10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2 Retrieved from: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10094/8152

Audio:

Musical Intro/outro is Canada by Picture of the Floating World found at freemusicarchive.org