Future Continuous Learning - Thoughts on Education and Learning Today

I love this post titled  Why I Hate "Digital Citizenship"  from Keith Heggart on Edutopia and Heggart's own website . Heggart in fact really cares about digital citizenship, but not narrowly defined as keeping children safe online, as it so often is. He distinguishes between digital responsibility and digital citizenship, and writes, "It's kind of like teaching children to cross the road safely, and then claiming that's teaching citizenship. Citizenship is how to participate - safely, yes, but also meaningfully and thoughtfully - in civil society, in political, social and other spheres." The verb "participate" is the key. Digital citizenship education is about so much more than telling teenagers "what to post and what not to post", which, as Heggart says, is a very noble endeavor, but just doesn't go far enough in our quest to grow active citizens. I'm developing a digital citizenship unit within a high school civics course,

I recently read  Douglas Rushkoff 's 2010 book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age . I first heard of the book at a panel at this year's Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) national conference - one of the presenters mentioned that she used this book for an "Intro to Critical Thinking" course she teaches to college freshmen. It's an interesting choice for that purpose, because Rushkoff isn't so much arguing in this book that people should take on a particularly critical perspective when interacting with the media of a digital age. Instead he's arguing that we should concern ourselves with understanding the way it all works, and that effort to understand will itself engender a critical perspective. Rushkoff uses the term "program" in a very literal sense - his ideal 21st century citizen would absolutely know how to program, and actually, he says, it's not that hard and anyone can learn ho