Photo by Ari He on Unsplash
What?
Law 12 class:
Student-“Thank God I deleted that old photo of myself doing …………..!”.Â
Me- “Did you?”
Student- “ Yup, after we talked in class about the use of peoples social media (SM) accounts as tools for future employers, school admin, ETC to look us up, and how our data is sold, I cleaned up my Facebook and Instagram”
Me- “Good start, did you increase your privacy settings?”
Student- “Yes”.
Me- “Good, now did you look at the tag setting for your photos?”
Student- “ Yup, set those as well”.
Me- “Wait a minute, you didn’t mention cleaning up your SnapChat?”
Student- “I don’t need to, it disappears after 10 seconds.”
Me- “Sit down and let’s talk about data-permanency.”
So What?
How do we make that connection with cell phones and not only their addictive potential but the data-proliferation and ownership of your data? Phones and tech are a great tool that has reinvented and will continue to reinvent, the way we process and disseminate information. We should not fear this. That would be counter-productive. How do we embrace this in an informed manner? We should teach it!Â
Now What?
The new curriculum does lay-out how to teach media literacy. I have looked it over and it is good. Nieve but good. It is my opinion that teaching the students about what implications their digital footprint may have on their lives has to be more organic. It needs to be more conversation-based, tied to a real-life scenario that is happening. In the Law class mentioned above, we were talking about the suicide cases in the east and the contributions of SM in those cases in terms of bullying ETC. We talked about whether someone should be responsible for the results of their online behaviour and they said yes. I asked if there should be laws in place to make you responsible for that behaviour, and they paused. I asked if an employer should be able to make employment decisions based on their SM information and they said no. I then asked them how they believed what happens online does not correlate with who they really are? They said social media is the place that they can be who they are at the moment, but maybe not who they actually are. That led to a great conversation about intent and privacy that lasted 40 minutes. It was all organic and non-lecture based. Just a conversation in a place where they were safe to express themselves and their thoughts. That, in my opinion, is how we teach digital footprints and SM. We talk about it. We talk about the value it has on our planet and in our lives. We talk about its benefits without ignoring its drawbacks. We talk about our responsibility in societies both outside, and on the web.Â
By: Andrew Vogelsang