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Digital citizenship vs digital responsibility (there's a huge difference)

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, This blog post so perfectly captures the spirit of what I'm putting together - I think I might make this the introductory reading for the unit.
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