Our approach this year was a little bit different – we actively sought out people already exploring the boundaries of cybersafety in schools and listened to how they are working to create New Zealand’s digital citizens of the future.

As well as creating a dedicated social networking site to recruit a new online panel of expert advisers, we also put together a poll and asked people ‘What are the 3 most important characteristics of a Digital Citizen?‘

The results of the poll are displayed below. For our thoughts on the event and related topics such as filtering in schools, check out these posts on the main NetSafe blog and our onsite reporting on the Learn:Guide:Protect site.

For those people who’ve never attended Ulearn, sit back and enjoy a 3 and a half minute video guide to the event, hosted by NetSafe’s own camera friendly talent, Martin Cocker:

What are the 3 most important characteristics of a Digital Citizen?

Yesterday I mentioned that everybody is tweeting, blogging, pod casting and generally living the web 2 life. Its actively encouraged here. It must be quite a sight from the podium when you’re a keynote. 1500 faces lit by the glow of their laptop screens. ( I guess I’ll find out if I ever have anything interesting enough to say to get a keynote spot. )

With all this tweeting and blogging and casting going on, it got me thinking. What’s the point? Are we just serving up more pointless content (this post excluded of course) that will be lost in the information exo flood? Whats the point of it all?

We’re running a survey at Ulearn and we’re looking for input from delegates.  Yesterday, 130 people followed a twitter post through to the survey. So as a targetted “marketing” tool, twitter has delivered. And if you’ve been following the #ulearn09 feed on twitter, you’ll know its been pretty busy. RED has  been using it to promote some items they’re selling – and I’ll be interested to hear how people feel about that level of commercial intrusion on the conference feed (but that’s for another time).

A few years ago, I was listening to Derek Wenmoth talking about blogs. He said his started as a way to collate his thoughts, and it grew into something other people found interesting.  What’s important is that his blog works for him first, and then us second. I suspect for a lot of people here, these participation technologies serve a similar purpose.

And they’re fun. Kids like using them, and we want teachers to guide the kids when they’re using them. Therefore, its important that teachers are comfortable with them. The easiest way to get comfortable with a technology is to use it.

Implications are then that for NetSafe, we need to know that teachers have the confidence to know that they can rise to the challenges that digital citizenship learning raises. This seems probably obvious to many people but it’s kind of new information for me.

Implications seem to suggest then that we need to do all that we can to support teachers’ professional development and content provision (i.e., teaching activities on digitial citizenship) to empower them to educate on digital citizenship.

I think this is really interesting – and these points have come to me from Helen Timperley’s presentation today on Promoting Teacher Professional Learning and Development. She pointed out that teachers are good at supporting their students learning, but that they often fail to apply the same techniques to themselves and their own learning.

Thinking about cybercitizenry then I’m struck by conversations I had when we were developing the cyberbullying resource for primary and intermediate schools. Many times I heard that many teachers and even some schools, weren’t really going to take cyberbullying (or bullying in general), that seriously, because they either didn’t believe it was a problem, or, importantly for this conversation, because they believed that there wasn’t much they could do to manage it.

While the majority of teachers we work with have the confidence that they can make a difference in cyber citizenship, I now wonder if they overwhelming cultural inertia that some schools exhibit towards cybercitizenship also reflects a lack of confidence that they can, and therefore could, do anything to improve it.

By the way, Andrew Church’s talk on the digital citizen is responsible for me launching straight out with what I’ve got to say in the first opening lines of this blog. His preso is online and provides some fascinating stats and he’s really engaged with digital citizenship – and in his talk he talked about research to show how we now read differently – in an F shaped pattern, and now brain scans show you’ve got to get your beans out at the top of the page if you want to anyone to read it.