14 years ago was the first time that I tried blogging with students. Here is a quote from a blog post about the rules I created for this new online space:
There is one thing above all others that significantly impressed me with this experience: Students owning the learning, asking the important questions, and helping each other to learn. They showed an incredible willingness to contribute/share their ideas.
I wasn’t sure what rules I should give around ‘Safe Blogging’ so I pared it down to some basics. In our school we have been slowly rolling out the ideas of Restitution and we have developed 4 basic beliefs: Respect, Safety, Inclusion, and Learning. So I thought why not use these beliefs as the guiding principles for the blogs and communities?
The idea was simple. What rules and expectations do we apply to our school community? Those also apply in our digital spaces.
Now more than ever, we are going to see issues of behaviour in online learning spaces that are inappropriate? Why? Because we have students and educators who are new to these spaces who are learning as they go. It is important to talk about appropriate use and expectations, if you want to be proactive rather than reactive. But creating draconian rules and conditions won’t help. When I see this happening I always go back to a quote I first heard from my colleague, Dave Sands, “Laws create outlaws.”
Instead, think about what the underlying behaviour expectations are in classrooms and in schools? Then ask, how do these same expectations look online? The idea here is that digital citizenship is just citizenship. Digital spaces might be new frontiers for some educators and students, but they are frontiers in classroom learning spaces that have been around for a very long time. If we know how we want students to act in our classrooms, we also know how we want them to act in their digital classrooms.
When schools start in September, teachers create expectations for their class. Often this will involve conversations and even participation by students in determining what a good learning environment looks like. The same should apply to entering new online learning environments. The choice is simple, be proactive and explicit about expectations, or be reactive when things don’t go as expected… because the expectations aren’t clear.
One final thought, even when you lay out all the expectations, students will make mistakes. At this point a decision needs to be made: will the response be punitive or will the response be a learning opportunity?
