RESEARCH WINDOWS
A New Concept of Citizenship
for the Digital Age
Christine Greenhow
Across the world, a host of educational agencies endorse the idea that youth must cultivate “21st-century competencies” if they are to be academically successful
and prepared for future workplaces in a global
knowledge economy. ISTE and the Partnership
for 21st Century Skills in the United States have
formulated definitions of six important 21st-
century competencies: technological fluency,
innovation, communication and collaboration,
research and information fluency, problem
solving, and digital citizenship.
The last of these—digital citizenship—is the
least likely to be discussed in the educational
research literature.
The 2007 NETS•S defines digital citizenship as
the ability to practice and advocate online behavior that demonstrates legal, ethical, safe, and
responsible uses of information and communication technologies. To comply with the NETS,
educators need to develop and model these
competencies and facilitate their development
in students, but what constitutes “legal, ethical,
safe, and responsible” is not entirely clear.
Christine Greenhow
is an educational
researcher, a visiting
fellow in digital education at Yale University,
and chair of the Social
Networks Research
Collaborative at the
University of Minnesota,
where she received the
Postdoctoral Scholar
Award. Learn more at
www.cgreenhow.org.
Define Digital Citizenship
If educators and administrators are looking
to the research literature to help them make
informed decisions about digital citizenship considerations in developing curriculum, pedagogy,
or policy, they may come up short. The concept
of digital citizenship is difficult to define, demonstrate, and measure for a number of reasons.
In the July 2009 issue of Learning, Media,
and Technology, an article I wrote about infor-
mal learning and identity in social network sites
touched on the concept of digital citizenship and
my results from studying it briefly among online
teens. I wasn’t surprised to discover that concepts
of citizenship and citizenship education abound,
and definitions of online citizen-like behaviors
that fall under the descriptors of legal, ethical,
safe, and responsible vary among countries, cul-
tures, school systems, and standards-setting agen-
cies. This is despite the fact that the Internet, and
students’ behaviors on the Internet, in many ways
transcend physical boundaries.
