Every new generation of technology refreshes the need for educators to think critically about how students experience that technology and, hopefully, take command of it for their own purposes. To benefit from emerging tools, students need support from educators to develop a combination of digital fluency, digital identity, and digital citizenship. Ultimately, we want students to be agents who can use technology to be creators instead of passive consumers.
The newest generation of technology, of course, is generative AI. It is raising challenging questions for faculty and students about “keeping up,” authenticity, integrity, responsible use, bias, privacy, and abuse.
However we respond to those questions, we should anticipate they will all get raised again with the next wave. (Keep your eye on the horizon for agentic AI.) When thinking about how we as educators support student development in the context of digital technologies like generative AI, it’s important to sort out what is evergreen from what is specific to the new thing.
Digital fluency
Competence with digital tools is often defined by the functional operation of it — knowing how to click the right buttons. Meanwhile, the list of tools and their buttons grows ever longer. It’s not really possible or even necessarily desirable to keep up with them all in that functional sense.
Digital fluency is better understood as:
- a sense of how a technology works
- a sense of the range and quality of the tools available
- the ability to evaluate them critically
- the confidence you will be able to teach yourself when you need to
AI is changing what students need to be fluent in, but it’s not changing the need to move beyond being adept at operating them to having a critical stance.
Digital identity
If someone were to Google you today, what would show up? What would they learn about you?
Digital identity is who you are when you’re online. Your identity online is formed by what, where, and why you post and by your learning community — who you follow and are followed by.
We have a digital identity whether we intend to or not, and people can be very clever at creating a digital identity that may have nothing to do with the rest of their lives. That’s all the more reason for educators to help students consider the complexities of safety, responsibility, permanence, privacy, and creativity as they shape their digital identities and digital footprints.
For example, one first impulse might be to advise students that the safest thing is to always keep things professional online. But that may be too limiting across the multitude of creative and playful online platforms. Supporting students to always maintain integrity might be a more potent approach.
The emergence of blogs, social media, connected gaming, mobile devices, and video streaming each prompted new ways to build up and manage a digital identity. Now students will need to think about how they show up on emerging AI platforms or how they share their creativity online when it is enabled by AI tools.
Digital citizenship
Educators want to help students discover how they will make their contributions to society, and digital citizenship is now a fundamental part of that. Digital citizenship is actively and positively contributing to online spaces with kindness and responsibility.
Digital environments raise special considerations about good citizenship because they can be anonymous, remote, and automated, and they are mass media with enormous reach. For example:
- One rule of good digital citizenship is don’t be a troll and don’t feed trolls with your engagement.
- On some platforms, good citizenship requires everyone making an effort to contribute.
- In other cases, good citizenship means considering whether or not to engage at all and, if so, what’s the appropriate tone for the audience. For example, “mansplaining” and novice white students providing a contrary opinion to a scholar of color aren’t helpful contributions. Being a good digital citizen means knowing your audience, taking the time to know who you are engaging with, and asking if the community needs your participation in a particular thread.
Another reason educators should guide reflection about digital citizenship is that some of our students will go on to influence how the next generation of digital tools are developed or implemented in their workplaces and communities. When they do, they will hopefully mitigate the algorithmic bias, inaccessible design, and predatory business models that each wave of technology tends to reproduce.
Ultimately, digital citizenship is mission critical. A case study in EDUCAUSE Review, Digital Citizenship + Liberal Arts = Students Empowered for Life, argues that the questions raised by digital citizenship initiatives are central to a liberal arts education in particular and to the mission of higher education more broadly.
“Because these questions are addressed with a focus on critical thinking, navigating complexity, and multidisciplinary perspectives, which are important to higher education as a whole, they address gnarly challenges and frame critical digital inquiry for continuous learning.”
Factors affecting digital fluency, identity, and citizenship
Equity. Culturally relevant pedagogy that connects academic work to students’ lives necessarily means thinking about the digital spaces where they spend so much time. This is part of being aware of who they are, what they bring to the table, and what they are interested in learning.
Many of those spaces start out deeply inequitable — built on biased data, designed with a particular user in mind, and distributed unevenly. Fluency, command of their identity, and good citizenship in digital spaces requires examining those inequities.
Access to quality teaching practices. Access to hardware and software is essential, but two different students sitting in neighboring classrooms with the same tools in front of them can develop different levels of digital agency. The teaching practices they experience matter as much as the tools.
Students need professors who, along with using a critical approach, know how to inspire, engage, and give them agency to be more creative with digital spaces.
Open and authentic. A profoundly uninteresting way to use digital tools is to assign students to go on the LMS discussion board and make X number posts and Y number of replies. That rarely prompts an authentic conversation.
The more we open conversations up outside of the boundaries of the classroom — or walled-off digital spaces — the more opportunity students have for engaging in relevant real-world questions. Social media is one space for that.
Open doesn’t mean unstructured. Many educators have had success using software for collaborative annotation of learning materials. Students interact in authentic ways with one another and even with invited guests like peers at other institutions, outside scholars, or the original author.
Evergreen approaches to digital fluency, identity, and citizenship
At Every Learner Everywhere, we’re developing resources on critical AI literacy for faculty and are compiling resources from others. We’ve already presented several workshops and webinars on the critical use of AI in higher education.
(A new favorite resource of mine that I’m recommending everywhere I go is Framework for Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) In Education from the Inclusive Design Research Centre.)
While working to increase our own fluency in AI, we try to remember that though AI is raising new possibilities and creating new contexts, some things won’t change. Educators should assume any given tool is temporary, while the most important parts of education are not.
What remains evergreen in the emerging context of generative AI?
I would say we still want students to know how to use their own voice and how to evaluate. I believe transparency will remain a hallmark of good scholarship. And good old-fashioned critical thinking will always be a superpower.
Creative educators will find ways to use AI to teach and enable those skills. Our students are going online with or without us. They didn’t stay off social media or leave their smartphones at home just because some of us disapproved. And they’re not going to avoid AI.
So who is guiding them as they do so? As educators, we have always had the opportunity and responsibility to bolster students’ ability to make changes in the world that can improve the lives of others. Now that means grappling with what fluency, identity, and citizenship mean in digital contexts.
We have the opportunity and responsibility to inspire students to do more than just click the right buttons. We can help them become agents in command of how they explore, create, and contribute to their communities.
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