Section 1 – Overview
Digital citizenship is fast becoming a focus for NZ educators. NetSafe’s recent poll on the important skills of digital citizens, revealed that New Zealand educators see ethical behaviour and critical thinking as vital for their students.
There are many opportunities for young people to learn and develop these skills in an education environment with the classroom teacher as a guide and mentor, but some educators see filtering content as hampering these teaching and learning opportunities.
Does filtering prevent opportunities for students to develop their own “filtering skills” so they have the critical awareness of what is appropriate in their own learning context?
What do you think?
Chris Hails
Some key factors of education are helping students become active, self-directed, life-long learners. Partly, this involves giving students to opportunity to internalise guidelines around safety online, and to then apply those guidelines in a low-risk environment such as school, thereby developing analytical and evaluative tools that will serve them well for the future. It can also be a positive environment to discuss aspects such as cyber-bullying and strategies to deal with it.
At the end of the day, students have to deal with risky situations every day – crossing the road is fraught with dangers, but kids aren’t locked away from the traffic – rather they are taught strategies for crossing as safely as possible…including the self-directed decision as to whether they use the designated ’safe’ option such as the pedestrian crossing.
Obviously, learning, socialising, and being safe online is a rather more complex set of issues, but filtering, I feel does not do justice to the potential of our learners to develop their own critical awareness that will continue to keep them safe once they have left school.