What is Digital Citizenship?

Everyone reading this blog, has, at minimum, dual citizenship. You may already have citizenship to one or more nations, but your presence online also grants you digital citizenship. Traditionally we gained citizenship to a place by being born there (right of soil), or having a parent/grandparent born there (right of blood). The everydayness of the internet in our lives means that most of us will spend a few hours a day on cyber-soil, granting us the bundle of rights and responsibilities of citizenship as they are applied to the digital world.

But it’s not enough just to be born somewhere if you want to maintain citizenship. We know that in most countries if you break particular laws (or enough smaller laws) you go to jail and lose your citizenship. Similarly, if you do not have the skills or knowledge to function in a particular land you have to go someplace where you can survive and be safe, and take out citizenship of that place instead.

Digital citizenship refers to the skills, knowledge and attributes required to achieve the things you want in a way that keeps you safe and meets the responsibilities expected of you. But because no one owns the internet (even though they may want to) or the tubes through which it flows, who sets the responsibilities and who enforces the rights of digital citizenship is undefined.

Locally, NetSafe has explored what digital citizenship could mean in Aotearoa/NZ. The NetSafe model sees digital citizenship as the nexus of skills, values, and knowledge that enables someone to use ICT (digital literacy) safely (cybersafety) to ethically, effectively, and respectfully (as described by some of the values and key competencies in the NZ curriculum) achieve what they need. Digital citizens must possess skills and knowledge in all three of these domains, otherwise they risk losing citizenship through harm to themselves, ineffectiveness, and/or sanctions.

What’s driving the interest in Digitial Citizenship?

Two thrusts are sharply driving interest in Digital Citizenship: 1.) safety concerns and 2.) The potentials offered by e-learning.

Contemporary cybersafety work in terms of child safety is roughly 15 years old. Although this work has undoubtedly increased safety, holes have appeared in some of the thinking underlying cybersafety philosophies. Technical solutions have proven to be limited in protecting children from potentially harmful content and conduct (not withstanding the technical limitations introduced with BYOD). Awareness raising approaches, while effective at educating people how to keep safe online, fall down when other users do not treat others safely, respectfully or ethically (e.g., road-safety metaphor time: it doesn’t help you to be safe if other road users drive on your side of the road, or use a car with failing breaks, etc.).

The rise in digital citizenship interest reflects the fact that focusing only on cybersafety does not produce a safe environment if there is not a focus on ensuring that other digital citizens use this space ethically, respectfully, and safely. 

Secondly, the push for digital citizenship reflects the contemporary value ascribed to e-learning and its various blended and virtual siblings. In scores of countries policies and funding now promote e-learning. The expectation for schools is no longer that young people will simply be entertained by the internet, but will instead occupy it and use it for learning. With this comes the recognition that these learners have rights in this space, as much as they have rights in their classrooms that they sit in. Equally, there is the attendant requirement for learners’ responsibities to others in this space. Locally, Ultra Fast Broadband in Schools and e-portfolios are examples of the value by which educators and the government place on e-learning. The awareness that safety concerns may limit uptake of these opportunities makes digital citizenship a strong contender for change.

What does this all mean?

Currently the safety issues raised by the the ‘wild-west’ of the internet, and the inability of traditional cybersafety approaches to prevent them, see these issues being brought into the purvue of governments and law makers. Locally we see this manifesting in increasing regulatory pressure for action (e.g., most recently on cyberbullying). We should expect to see more legislative pressure and regulation around digital citizenship concerns.

We need to ensure that we teach young people about using ICT to achieve what they need in a respectful and ethical way that keeps them safe. This means recognising that that teaching people how to be safe is not always going to keep them safe, and nor will relying on internet filters to always do the job. We need to ensure that all digital citizens understand their responsibilities and their rights, and we need to find ways to enforce these rights carefully.

These issues highlight the need to ensure that schools plan for the provision of digital citizenship within their strategic planning. Increasingly this will become a critical way to ensure that the school community gets the most out of e-learning. School communities need to ensure that their educators are confident in supporting learners to become thriving digital citizens.

What can you do?

Don’t let stubborn cybersafety and digital citizenship concerns hold you back – If you are passionate about e-learning and student-centred practice, then:

• Advocate for your school to incorporate a digital citizenship into its strategic plan.
• Use NetSafe’s excellent Learn | Guide | Protect website. The website lists resources and approaches to embed cybersafety and digital citizenship within your practice.
• Speak out for professional development for digital citizenship so your school community can get the most out of e-learning and not be left behind.
• Check out Mike Ribble’s comprehensive work on digital citizenship.

Information about CORE's Ten Trends

• An introduction to CORE's Ten Trends for 2012
• An explanation about CORE's Ten Trends


There is a growing awareness that one-size-fits-all approaches to school knowledge and organisation are increasingly ill-adapted both to addressing individuals' needs and to the knowledge society at large.

As teachers, therefore, we strive every day (well…most days) to provide some degree of individualised approach to our teaching in the classroom—to hopefully interact with each student on an individual basis, and to provide something that meets their particular needs.

Over the past 10-15 years many governments have tried to create social systems with the citizen at their centre, challenging the ‘old’ model, and developing systems that are more responsive to individual needs: "a system that responds to individual pupils, by creating an education path that takes account of their needs, interests and aspirations." (See link to document below.)

These governments are usually in OECD economies where the need for this approach is probably better recognised, and where educations systems have (in most cases) moved on from the provision of education at a massive scale, or where the Millennium Development Goals are still a target to be reached.

In the same way that many of the current aspects of our “modern” education system grew out of the needs for trained workers for the UK's Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, the newer, more personalised, approach can be seen to be allied to the economic changes that have been at work in the last 10–15 years.

Now, in 2012 as the centre of Henry Ford's "any colour as long as its black" approach to mass production moves from Europe and the USA to those nations where total costs are lower, so the new economic model for “a modern economy” moves towards a more personalised, consumerist approach. In the education sector this
 new approach to personalised learning followed the emergence of the term (as we know it now) in the UK in 2004. The move beyond uniform, mass provision of education can therefore be seen in a wider sense as "personalisation" of consumerism (entertainment and advertising in particular) and of public services more widely.

Noted UK educationalist David Hargreaves acknowledged this in 2004 (PDF) by observing that "customisation in business is where goods or services are tailor-made, in contrast to the mass production of good or services. Mass customisation means providing goods or services at the prices of mass production. Personalised learning is an educational version of this, and means meeting the needs of every learner more fully than we have in the past."

His vision was still somewhat controversial some years on.

So where we did (and do) have individualisation of education—providing (essentially) the same objects for all learners, the trend to personalisation—is predicated on providing differing objects for all learners. ‘If I can have a mass production car built to my specification, why can my child not have a mass production education built to his?’

Personalisation in the business world is about creating the illusion of individuality for the consumer while giving the producer the advantages of mass production. Personalisation in education, though, means pupils get what they need, not what they want. It is not the pupil's decision, but someone else’s.

Ninja Google Masters such as yourselves will quickly find a range of approaches to personalisation that rise out of the work of practitioners such as Benjamin Bloom (Mastery Learning) and Howard Gardner (Multiple Intelligences). Additionally, there is the ongoing debate that has been happening since the 1980s around the benefits of mixed ability teaching morphing into a range of 1990s differentiation approaches. While all of these still play their part in classrooms around New Zealand (and the world) every day, in the 2010s it is the inexorable rise of digital technologies such as that is playing a pivotal role in enabling this new degree of personalisation to occur.


Broader tools that fit into this category include:

• Learning Management Systems—delivering what your student needs/wants in terms of curriculum material provides flexibility in curriculum delivery timing but is it personalised?
• ePortfolios—"a record of the best work that I have produced over time and that I can take with me as I transition from one education organisation to another. In New Zealand this usually means Mahara (or the version supported by the Ministry of Education, MyPortfolio) and often supported by the work of people like Dr Helen Barrett
• Personal computing devices—the BYOD-mania / 1-to-1 computing trend that is sweeping the world (or parts of it).

At the leading edge of larger online systems (past that usually seen in New Zealand), there are the types of larger “personalised”, adaptive, learning systems from vendors such as Pearson or McGraw Hill (Learn Smart). These are like LMSes-on-steroids and have the capital, and are designed to deliver at scale (i.e. to cohorts of schools and students in excess of most schools in the New Zealand system). 



Summary: As noted above, the trend is to no longer have a one-size-fits-all approach—the classroom is going mobile. These trends will only increase as broadband and wireless speeds increase, and as student initiated learning and pathways become more commonplace. Education will be the great differentiator of the 21st century, and New Zealand schools will need to continue to lift their game in the face of a series of global challenges.

How this will play out in a post-global financial crisis and a more Asia-centric world will be interesting to watch unfold.



What are your views?

Information about CORE's Ten Trends

• An introduction to CORE's Ten Trends for 2012
• An explanation about CORE's Ten Trends