BA project

Co-producing Understandings of Digital Responsibility: ‘Digital Wildfires’, Social Media and Responsible Citizenship

British Academy research project

Principal Investigator Carina Girvan

Co-Investigators William Housley, Adam Edwards, Rob Procter, Marina Jirotka

BACKGROUND

Innovation in digital communications is transforming traditional social configurations and relations. Social media enables users to share information with multiple others quickly and easily. This can reinvigorate civil society via new forms of digital participation through networked debate, deliberation and information sharing and it is often claimed that social media has the potential to transform the learning experience both inside and out of the classroom. While this can have positive impacts, it can also lead to ‘digital wildfires’ in which misleading or provocative content (e.g. in the form of rumour or hate speech) spreads rapidly with very negative impact.  In media there are sufficiently regular reports of young people’s misuse of social media which results in harm to themselves and others.  Therefore educating users on the risks of social media and how to act as responsible digital citizens is essential.

While there are growing concerns around young people’s social media usage, from cyberbullying to sexting, there is also a new digital divide between teachers and students in terms of their use and exposure to different forms of social media and the technologies they use to access them.  Schools are currently caught between developing students' knowledge and understanding of responsible usage of technology, whilst governing its use. 

METHODS

 The Co-producing Understanding of Digital Responsibility project aimed to develop teachers’ and students’ understanding of responsible social media usage and digital citizenship through the co-production of innovative teaching and learning materials, reducing the divide and creating a growing knowledge community.  It followed an approach in which learners create knowledge artefacts with and for others,;learners aged 12-14 participated in four lessons during which they chose a digital responsibility topic to research and created a digital artefact to demonstrate their understanding, which was shared with others.  Feedback from others, reflection and evaluation were used to inform the development of these artefacts which would become resources for other learners.

Mixed-method exploratory case studies were conducted at two demographically very different secondary schools in the UK, to explore whether this approach provided an insight into young people’s (mis)understandings of social media use and whether it could be used to bridge the digital divide between teachers and students.  At each school, teachers and researchers worked together to co-design the lesson structure and content.   The aim was to produce age appropriate and context sensitive lesson activities and resources which would engage learners and empower them to share their existing knowledge, identify areas of uncertainty, conduct their own research and produce a personally meaningful digital resource to share with others.

The lessons were implemented over four weeks in ICT lessons (School A) or form/registration time (School B).  The first lesson at each school provided opportunities to introduce the research and lesson activities, as well as act as a first point for data collection through a general knowledge quiz and questionnaire.  Throughout the lessons an audio recorder captured the conversations that occurred within groups as they worked.  The digital resources they created, together with planning sheets, evaluation and reflection documents created over the four weeks represented a set of knowledge artefacts for each group.  Finally a semi-structured interview was conducted with two groups of pupils at each school, as well as the class teacher.

Data analysis was driven by the qualitative data and as exploratory case studies, the data from each school was analysed separately using the constant comparative approach. This was followed by a between-case analysis in which a common set of codes and categories were identified, along with any unique to a specific case.

RESULTS 

The findings demonstrate that by the age of 13 young people have been bombarded with messages on internet safety and whilst they “know the rules”, they are also continually socially constructing their own concepts of acceptable usage, testing the boundaries of rules and engaging in sophisticated and often carefully nuanced uses of the technology both for educational and social purposes.  Teachers learned from and about their students, whilst also identifying important gaps in their knowledge.  The outcomes of this project highlight the assumptions that are often made about young people’s knowledge and skills of this technology and the implications for the educational use of social media within and outside of the classroom.

Beyond the project itself, the teachers have reported that they are using both the original lesson plans and resources created by the students in the current academic year with new groups.  The long-term aim of the project is for teachers to continue to use the resources created by one group of learners as the starting point for the next group, upon which they can develop their own resources.  They are not intended to provide the “correct answer”, recognising the ever shifting landscape of young people’s use of social media, or cover all content.  Rather the resources created provide an accessible way for students to learn from their peers and begin to develop their own ideas. Thus teachers and students are not only developing artefacts of knowledge to share between themselves, but are also extending the community of learners within and potentially outside the school who have a shared conceptual understanding of responsible citizenship and can apply this knowledge to new and emerging risks within the developing contours of digital society.