Frances Bell’s Blog

This very interesting post http://edorigami.edublogs.org/2009/05/21/digital-citizen-acceptable-use-agreement/provoked a bit of discussion on Twitter this morning.  Andrew Churches has done some useful work on deriving an Acceptable Use Policy based on 6 tenets of digital citizenship.

“The Digital Citizen will follow six tenets of citizenship.

1. Respect yourself

2. Protect yourself

3. Respect others

4. Protect others

5. Don’t steal

6. Honour Intellectual property.” http://edorigami.edublogs.org/2009/05/04/the-digital-citizen/

I really like those tenets as, apart from #5 as Alec Couros pointed out, they are all stated positively. When these tenets are converted into an Acceptable Use Policy, I think that they can work within the specific context for which they are developed, and for a specific service.  So Andrew has developed them for ICT services at the school where he works that has already stated Christian values.  The term Digital Citizen implies behaviours that go beyond school and beyond one service, and that’s where I think the difficulties begin to creep in.  Citizenship is clearly an important part of the School curriculum (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=citizenship+education&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=) with good resources developed to support it.  However, the learning of what it means to be a good citizen implies some sort of active engagement with the ideas, and some degree of flexibility in what might be (un)acceptable.

One approach to developing an AUP, shown in our work a few years ago at CABWEB (http://francesbell.com/respectingdifferencerespectingdifference/) followed Amy Jo Kim’s advice on online community policies - Create, Enforce, Evolve but wasn’t without its difficulties.  Students were asked to consider and discuss the UNESCO Principles of Tolerance.  In the event, without much tutor scaffolding, their discussion focused on their commonsense understanding of ‘tolerance’.  Discussion was lively though, and included examples of openness and peer  regulation by argument.

There is a healthy gap between declarative statements about the behaviours of citizens and policy statements for the use of ICT services, and it’s in that gap that productive dialogue can take place.  For example, “I will not visit sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate” is a perfectly reasonable caveat to have in a school AUP (though inappropriate is a tricky concept).  An interesting topic for (citizenship) class discussions would be the proposition “My government should prevent its citizens from visiting sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate”.  Educated citizens could have diverse views on that one.

I am teaching a module on Emerging Technologies and Ethics/use policies are something we shall address. Clearly AUPs are necessary and valuable but I think there is space between being an acceptable user of a service and being a digital citizen.  Come to think of it there spaces between AUPs for different services too.  The challenge is in dealing with diversity.