Lee is coauthor of Mindful Assessment, Understanding the Digital Generation, The Digital Diet, Living on the Future Edge, and the bestseller Literacy Is Not Enough. He works with educators and corporations in several countries, helping them make the shift to regain relevance and establish a culture of excellence.
To learn more about Lee’s work, visit https://globaldigitalcitizen.org or www.leewatanabecrockett.com, or follow @leecrockett on Twitter.
Andrew Churches is a teacher and an information and communication technology enthusiast. He teaches at Kristin School, a school with a mobile computing program that teaches students with personal mobile devices and laptops, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand.
Andrew is also an edublogger, a wiki author, and an innovator. In 2008, Andrew’s wiki, Educational Origami, was nominated for the Edublog Awards’ Best Educational Wiki award. He contributes to several websites and blogs, including Tech & Learning magazine, Spectrum Education magazine, and The Committed Sardine Blog. Andrew believes that to prepare students for the future, we must prepare them for change and teach them to question, think, adapt, and modify.
He is the coauthor of Mindful Assessment, The Digital Diet, Apps for Learning, and the bestseller Literacy Is Not Enough.
To learn more about Andrew’s work, visit https://globaldigitalcitizen.org, or follow @achurches on Twitter.
To book Lee Watanabe Crockett or Andrew Churches for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
Lee’s mother was in her sixties when she told him she regretted never visiting Paris. She had secretly always dreamed of going, but during her life had never been outside North America. In 2005, over a cup of coffee, Lee slid two tickets to Paris across the table, and a few weeks later, she ate a crepe late at night under the Eiffel Tower. He had never seen her happier. It was a very special trip, and this city, which he had visited many times before and knew well, repeatedly showed them its beauty and graciousness.
On the morning they planned to go to the Louvre, she was impatient and anxious as they lingered over the normal French breakfast of coffee and croissants. She told him she wanted to get an early start so she could see everything before it got busy—Lee felt the need to manage expectations and frame the experience a little. He gently told her the Louvre is one of the largest museums in the world. There are well over seventy thousand artworks in its sprawling 650,000 square feet of gallery space. There are over eight million visitors a year, so they could expect to share it with twenty-two thousand people that day. But even if they were by themselves and only spent thirty seconds in front of each work of art, it would take almost six hundred hours to see it all—it’s just not possible in a day. Instead, he suggested they take their time, decide then on the few things she really wanted to see, and then gaze at anything that caught their eyes in between, letting the crowds rush past as they wandered.
At the top of her list was the Mona Lisa, and as they got close, the crowd got thicker and more aggressive. Lee will always remember this moment. A security guard saw him trying to protect her from being knocked over and stepped forward to assist. The guard stopped the crowd and moved them back, taking his mother on his arm and escorting her directly in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. He paused and said to her, “Take all the time you like, madame. There is no rush. Enjoy this moment completely.” She did just that and gazed in wonder. Lee was so happy that he had studied painting in Florence because he was able to answer her questions and provoke her curiosity. It was as magical as watching a child discover his or her own hands.
As they stood there, Lee noticed many people funnel past, snapping a quick photo, and moving on. Most never saw the painting except through their camera lenses. He often recalls thinking how strange it was to spend the time and money to get to Paris just to take a picture and not even stop to look.
This was before the smartphone and long before the selfie. Now a visit to the museum means dodging not only the crowds but also trying to ignore the constant flashes and fake camera click sounds and, worst of all, navigating the sea of selfie sticks patrons precariously wave around.
Speaking of smartphones, did you check yours in the last hour? How about your email? Maybe you’ve updated your Facebook status or pinned something today? Are you following us on Twitter (@leecrockett and @achurches)? How are those LinkedIn connections doing? Have you texted anyone, checked your steps, looked at the weather, watched a video, played a game, logged your workout, recorded your food, or spent time searching for a productivity app that will help you get on top of your life?
People with smartphones and a data plan now hold access to the sum total of human knowledge and history in the palms of their hands. ScienceDaily reports that 90 percent of all online data in the world was generated between 2011 and 2013 (SINTEF, 2013). In light of this, is it any wonder our education institutions are grappling with how to affirm their purpose? It used to be that when someone posed a question in a social situation, discourse ensued, opinions and assumptions flew, and everyone was engaged in rich dialogue. Now it seems that the inevitable outcome of asking a question in a group will be the competition to see who can look it up fastest, followed by blank looks at each other with nothing left to talk about, and then everyone looking back to his or her phones for some sort of stimulation. Someone once told Lee the story of how, in this setting, as he grabbed his phone to verify his position, someone reached across and gently covered his phone and asked, “Would it be all right if, for just a little while, we didn’t know and could just wonder about it?” Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we all gave ourselves permission to wonder instead of know? Just for a few moments? Imagine the possibilities that could arise from being curious.
In February 2017, Facebook projected it would cross two billion monthly active users by mid-year (Popper & Erlick, 2017), which it did (Welch, 2017)—and Facebook is only one of hundreds of social networking opportunities. We have never been more connected than we are today, and yet for so many, we have never felt more alone. The Nike run app will stream your running route to your Facebook wall in real time, and your friends can cheer you on—literally. They click a button on your post, and you hear a crowd roaring on your phone with a message saying who cheered you on. This is really cool, but most people would rather their friends were with them on the run—that they were talking to each other, changing the pace and the route, and encouraging each other at the moment they actually needed it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And, no, you don’t have to give up your modern-day conveniences. Yes, devices can keep people distracted and isolated from engaging fully in life, but they also can be tools to help us to learn from each other and to change the world. It’s a question of how we use them. It’s a question of global digital citizenship.
Technology provides some of the biggest teachable moments ever. Through this book, we will share what we’ve learned through our experiences working with hundreds of schools around the world. We will help you transform acceptable use policies, restrictions, and outright bans to a system of cultivating respect and responsibility for oneself, others, and everything around us. We will show you how to expand the process to grow responsible, ethical, global citizens in a digital world.
Digital Citizenship Versus Global Digital Citizenship
When Internet-connected technology first started to appear in schools, educators quickly realized the need for guidelines for acceptable use of that technology. This most often resulted in restrictive acceptable use policies that often didn’t serve students’ needs or guide behavior outside the classroom. In this book, we discuss the limitations of these policies, which are primarily a list of rules and regulations rather than a guiding