For a while now I have been sharing various online articles which I believe relate to Digital Citizenship via twitter and also sometimes via linkedIn however it recently came to me that it might be useful to curate these tweets so that teachers looking for discussion material in relation to specific aspects of Digital Citizenship might be able to use them.

To that end I created three Wakelets based on three themes which I thought we reasonably common in relation to Digital Citizenship.

• AI, Drones, Driverless cars and the other societal changes with Tech may bring

https://wke.lt/w/s/kJ3z2B

• Cyber Security, Data Protection and Big Data

https://wke.lt/w/s/XFOeIs

• To ban or not to ban?

https://wke.lt/w/s/09MVpQ

Now it may be that in future I may expand the number of themes.  I suspect this is highly likely, but for now the above are hopefully a good starting point.

In addition, for ease, I have created a separate section on my site for this curated Digital Citizenship content in case anyone wants to bookmarks it.  This section is also available via the sites menu structure.

Consider Facebook, I would suggest that new parents starting using Facebook some years ago failed to fully understand the implications of posting every milestone of the children to the world.      Recent articles from the BBC and The Guardian seem to confirm this.

An article shared by a colleague got me to take a different perspective on things.    Considering the Facebook issue my initial thinking had put the error on the end users.   These end users had started using the site without understanding the long term implications.    Looking at google, my discussion with teachers focused on the teacher and their students considering the implications as end users.    But what if the blame, if blame might exist, falls somewhere else?

In an article in The Business Insider it is suggested that programmers need to receive ethical training.   It is the programmers which make the sites and services and define the specific functionality and operation.      If programmers at Facebook had considered the ethics of posting and sharing of an individuals life maybe the security and privacy options would have been more mature at the outset or maybe some warnings may have been displayed in relation to posting photos of your children.

Maybe a better illustration of the issue can be found looking at autonomous cars, which as we know, Google and a number of other companies are working on developing.     Lets assume an autonomous car gets into an accident resulting in damage to someone else’s vehicle and to injury.   Who is at fault?      Would it be the owner of the vehicle who may not even have been in the vehicle?   Would it be the passenger in the vehicle despite the fact they aren’t driving; it is an autonomous car.    Would it be the manufacturer of the car?     Or might it be the programmer who wrote the subsystem which failed to avoid the crash?

In future I will be more aware of the limits of a one sided viewpoint focused on the users as the decision makers; either using the service appropriately, ethically and morally or not.   The fact that a system could be used in an inappropriate or unethical way may indicate a failure of the programmers to appreciate the implications of their code, either now or in the future, or worse that the capability was programmed in, in the first place.

I also wonder about, whether with all the focus on coding in our schools, we also need to spend at least some time discussing the ethical issues surrounding programming.