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Director’s Blog
February 23, 2010
What are you Reading? Bennett’s “Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth” (MIT Press, 2007)
Over the past year, CFDE’s “Millennial Learners’ Series” has been thought provoking and fruitful. The Series is a set of workshops co-sponsored with Emory Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT) and University Technology Services (UTS), on the use of technology and the classroom. As a result of the series, I have been reading in and around the emerging area of digital citizenship. Faculty who attend our events regularly wonder about the nature and quality of engagement of their students, especially on line. Is Twitter really helping communication between students, or is it just a distraction? Is Facebook a vehicle for anything other than trivial information? And if so, how can it help the learning process without becoming just another social media distraction? Even more importantly, how can we think about what kinds of citizens they will become when their interactions with their various publics are so different in nature and scale? These kinds of questions go to the heart of how faculty understand their work as educators, now and in the future.
I have been reading the work of Lance Bennett, Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, (MIT Press, 2007) in trying to think about these questions.The essays cover a wide variety of topics by the leading figures in the field, including an analysis of youth civic culture on line (Karen Montgomery); the generation gap in how people receive news and politics (Michael Xenos and Kirsten Foot); media production and civic engagement (Howard Rheingold); creating digital media in schools (Peter Levine); and governments promoting e-citizenship (Steve Coleman). All of these essays address in some way or another generational differences in public life caused by the Internet.
In his excellent introductory essay, Lance Bennett makes the important observation that, in the current literature, are two different paradigms for the kind of engagement that are students have in public, civic life. Some studies report that they are disconnected from government, voting, volunteering and spend a larger and larger amount of time on-line. Others actually report that their engagement with questions of the public good has increased in a significant way. And for Bennett, reconciling these two competing paradigms is crucial if we are going to have a productive discussion of educational life and policies.
As he writes, the two paradigms actually are based on two different kinds of citizenship models. The first is an older citizenship based on duties and obligations to a group, and tends to focus on voting patterns and connections to government. The second is an actualizing citizenship model that factors loosely networked activism to address issues that reflect personal values. For these people, the kinds of traditional measures of public engagement, such as voting, is less meaningful than other kinds of work such as community volunteering and consumer activism. Social networks are maintained through personal relations and individuals collecting more loosely around common interests as they move in and out of each others’ worlds, whether they are cyber-worlds or face-to-face worlds.
I think Bennett’s insights have important implications for university life. As my colleague Connie Moon Sehat, Fellow in the Digital Humanities at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, has observed (along with many other scholars of technology and society), Web 2.0 has wrought a qualitative change to civic life. She goes on, “the relationship between technology and democracy has always been fraught, and the opportunities afforded by seemingly more egalitarian and distributed technologies such as the Internet provide no exception to this rule.” And as Debra Spitulnik, Associate Professor of Anthropology and founder of the Critical Media Literacy Group at Emory, has put it, Web 2.0 has massively increased the need for teaching critical thinking skills to our students around the questions of media usage and cultural production.
Sehat’s and Spitulnik’s observations were made as part of a larger conversation we have been having at CFDE which has emerged out of the Millennial Learners’ Series, called the “Digital Citizenship” Initiative. Our conversation is motivated by the commitment that we harness Web 2.0 for the purposes of higher education instead of feeling harnessed by it. How can faculty feel as if their classrooms are places where the content is the focus, not the technology?
We are not sure of all the ways we could do this, but we have come up with several basic possibilities: So many of us have very clear rules of citizenship in our classrooms—from parameters of civil discourse to clear statements of honor codes to attendance policies. What would it look like if, in every single class, we developed equally clear and thoughtful rules for our on-line class interactions? Might this approach not encourage students to be more thoughtful about how and when and why they went on-line? Many of us already do this in some basic way; what if we made the rules of our on-line classroom communities philosophically grounded in recent theories of technology and society?
In addition, might we not choose technologies that are themselves models of collaborative citizenship? Instead of teaching citizenship on the Web, why not teach it through the Web? We have been developing a list of particular technologies that teach skills in collaborative learning and community building–such as Zotero and Comment Press. We have also been exploring uses of digital media that promote these civic skills–such as Digital Storytelling.
If we focus on “best practices” in scholarly technologies and the uses of technologies to build civic skills, our hope is that faculty will find their classrooms a newly engaging place, and that “digital divide” that some of us encounter between citizenship models will instead become a bridge with which to build new forms of community.
–Laurie L. Patton, Director, CFDE
