Between this weeks #edtc300 class and the readings and TedTalks provided it was a real eye-opener. The first resource I looked at was the TedTalk, The Price Of Shame. This TedTalk was given by Monica Lewinsky and the effects of complexities of digital identity, digital citizenship, and our culture of constant documentation and the ways it affected her life. The culture of constant documentation almost destroyed her life. Her private life, pictures, and conversations were made public and were criticized in everyway imaginable. This would be one of the most extreme cases because of her circumstances. In her TedTalk she mention Tyler Clementi. Tyler Clementi was a young male who took his own life after an intimate video of him was posted online. Amanda Todd is another example of this. These three people are all victims of cyberbullying and our culture of constant documentation. None of these people deserved how they were treated and it wasn’t their own postings that they were criticized on.
In the cases of Monica Lewinsky, Tyler Clementi, and Amanda Todd the complexities of their digital identity and digital citizenship were destroyed by other people and cyberbullying and weren’t able to recover from it.
One of the suggested article I looked at was The IRL Fetish. This article talks a lot about how often students spend online. It is an everyday occurrence and is growing everyday. It connects to our culture of constant participation.
One article I looked at was Voices from the Classroom: A peek into the amazing things students are doing with technology. This article was given by the perspective of a current teacher who teaches a technology class and she says in her article she talks about teaching students about digital identity and how to be safe online. I think that it is really important as teachers to teach your students about digital identity and how to create a positive online profile. As we talked about it in class, it is important to speak from experience and t ‘s why it is important for us now to create a positive digital identity.
Another article I found is The complexity of Digital Identity. This article talks about building your digital identity and building it for future employers. It discusses marketing yourself. It also touches on the culture of constant documentation as it talks about how even if you delete things they are not always fully deleted.
I believe the most important thing for a teacher to teach their students would be how to be safe online and how to create a positive digital identity. In the classroom you could have conversations like we did in our last #edtc300 class about the negative posts and the consequences of those actions. As teachers it is our job to help students understand a negative post can have consequences and to help students understand how to make a positive impact instead.