Its digital citizenship week this week so I thought I would share some thoughts. Now, I have discussed and raised the issue of the need for more time in schools to discuss digital citizenship. Whether it is discussing the increasing need to be aware of cyber risks, or the increasing amount of data we are now sharing online or the increasing risk of our behaviours being influenced and manipulated by the tech tools we use, they all need discussion. Schools and colleges are looking to prepare students for the uncertain, but clearly digital futures they face, but still the focus is on narrow coverage of “online safety” when the risks now extend way beyond the content being covered.
And all of this is before generative AI made its appearance and became so publicly available late in 2022. Suddenly fake news is much easier to accomplish through generative AI tools that can easily modify content in terms of the video or audio, both being quick to achieve and also to achieve convincingly. Suddenly the phishing emails which were often laden with spelling errors or design issues, can be fed through a generative AI solution such that the resultant output is convincing in its styling plus free from grammar and spelling errors. In terms of influencing people through social media, generative AI allows for content creation to be automated with each piece of content being “unique” but with the common influencing message, far quicker than was possible previously. We also have the issue, that as we all start to use more and more AI, such as the excellent generative AI tools available, we leak yet more data online, where the generative tools online are more powerful than ever in inferring yet further data. At an event I attended recently it was suggested that if you fed your prompts from generative AI back into a generative AI solution and asked it to profile you it would do decent job of working out things like age, career, education, etc just based in the info you already put into generative AI tools.
So maybe post the free availability of ChatGPT and subsequently of so many other AI tools, or tools where generative AI such as ChatGPT is embedded, it becomes all the more important to discuss digital citizenship with our students. And maybe generative AI, if it frees educators up from the more administrative and basic tasks of education, provides both the issue and the solution. Maybe if generative AI and the AI solutions yet to come free us up from the mundane and the basic, maybe it will finally provide time and resources to cover digital citizenship at a time where it may be all the more important.
The path of the world is towards increasingly digital lives with the pace of digital technology advancement being quick. Regulation and governance is slow by comparison leaving us with a need to fill the void. I don’t have the answers for the future although I am positive as to the potential of technology to aid, enhance and even redefine our lives, however with this there is always a balance and therefore risks and challenges. This is where digital citizenship in schools comes in, in providing opportunities for the risks and challenges, both current and potential future risks and challenges, to be discussed and explored. We need to develop students who are aware and questioning of technology implications, rather than students who blindly adopt technology without consideration for the future. I believe we have a long way to go to address this issue but every step, every additional discussion, every assembly, every lesson including reference to digital citizenship being an additional step in the right direction.
Image courtesy of Midjourney
Technology and Learning