Wanted: Ambassadors for Science

June 16, 2010

unscientific america

Unscientific America:
How scientific illiteracy threatens our future.
By Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books, 2009.  209 pages.

Elected leaders point to a heavy snowfall in Washington, D.C. and claim that refutes the claims of global warming.

Forty-six percentage of Americans subscribe to young-Earth creationism.

Scientific research refutes the contention that vaccines cause autism in children. But every time a new study comes out on the subject, the parents and their supporters have a “scientific” answer that allows them to retain their beliefs.

Many people get their “science” from celebrities, friends, and a few non-mainstream doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus.

Where is today’s Carl Sagan?

As science awaits the next Great Communicator (Neil deGrasse Tyson is one possibility) this book considers other avenues for bringing useful and accurate information about science to the news media, political and cultural leaders, and the general public.

The authors have communicated about science for quite a long time. Chris Mooney hosts the Point of Inquiry podcast and is author of The Republican War on Science. Sheril Kirshenbaum is a member of the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas-Austin and is a former congressional science fellow.

Their lively book discusses the rifts between science and the major subcultures that shape our thinking—politics, news media, entertainment, and religion. It then proposes ways to bridge these rifts.  Mooney & Kirshenbaum argue that the burden of bridge-building rests with scientists and their professional organizations. For science to attain its deserved place at the table of public discourse, several things must happen.

Universities must reward scientists for public outreach and communication. University science programs should offer a more interdisciplinary education that unites scientific culture with communication and mass culture.

Scientists and their organizations must learn to make their knowledge politically relevant. They must learn to negotiate the halls of Congress as skillfully as any other interest group.

Film and television are massively powerful media and can be used to misinform. Scientists must learn how to wield these media, and for virtuous purposes (Randy Olson is doing a good job).

Although science and religion seem to clash regularly, the official position of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science is that faith and science are compatible. The scientific method in no way rules out the possibility of entities or causes outside of nature; it simply stipulates that they will not be considered within the framework of scientific inquiry.  Besides, the authors say, scientists might benefit from more conciliatory exchanges with the religious community:  The faithful have a vast store of knowledge about what it takes to motivate people, create community, and bring about social change.

Reconnecting science and our society will require mobilizing a new workforce, the authors say. The higher education science “pipeline” should generate more “science ambassadors” who can engage in outreach. At the same time, pro-science activists need to help. This can occur through communication with politicians,  the news media, the entertainment industry, and religious organizations.

As universities trains more scientists, also ensure they learn more about politics and the media. Scientists need communication skills to act as culture-crossers who engage in outreach.

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Communicating research is a public service

May 26, 2010

cornelia dean

Book review:
Am I making myself clear?  A scientist’s guide to talking to the public
By Cornelia Dean.
Harvard UP, 2009. 274 p.

Journalists and researchers both have important roles to play in communicating science to the public. Anyone questioning the need for better science communication need only consider recent debates over topics including climate change and evolution. Misinformation is spread by parties with financial or political interests at stake. And even when accurate news is available, it’s not always accepted. In some quarters it’s considered a badge of honor to place faith over reason.

The public’s ignorance of science helps explain how otherwise savvy people can think that creationism or its ideological cousin, intelligent design, is appropriate for a science classroom.

It’s not news that we Americans just don’t know much about science. We tend not to reason probabilistically, we have a shaky grasp of facts, and we don’t understand the scientific process. Arguments about values are often presented as if they are legitimate scientific disputes. People become disenchanted and confused.

Cornelia Dean is a science writer for the New York Times and teaches college seminars on science writing. In this book she provides practical, political, and policy reasons why scientists and researchers should engage more vigorously in the public life of the nation.

The tectonic shift in the news industry is forcing journalists to cover science and other complex issues with fewer and fewer resources. Researchers could help. But many scorn the mass media as an arena where important research is all too often misrepresented or hyped. In fact their graduate programs and academic departments train them not to spend time on anything but research.

But Dean argues that communicating research to the lay public is important for society—and a valuable use of researchers’ time.

Communicating research is difficult for a number of reasons. There’s a poor match between what researchers do and what ordinary journalists think of as news. Researchers and journalists tell stories differently. Researchers go from evidence to conclusion. Journalists report the conclusion first, then they put in as much detail as they have room for—often leaving out facts the scientist thinks are crucial.

Dean argues that communicating science to general audiences is a public service that’s equally as important as doing the science itself. Scientists who explain their work and their motivations help the public understand and deal with what feels like a chaotic rush of technological change.

It’s helpful when scientific and engineering organizations issue formal position statements on matters being argued in public. For example, in 2008 the National Academy of Science issued a book explaining that the theory of evolution is the foundation of modern biology and medicine, that there is no credible challenge to it, and that accepting evolution does not imply a rejection of religion.

Some researchers object that it’s pointless to try to communicate seriously with people whose attention span limits them to a minute or two per item. But if you are interested in reaching an audience, Dean says, you must consider the capacities of that audience.

Even the act of talking to a reporter is a public service. A scientist may speak for an hour and then end up with only one sentence in the article or on the air. But don’t assume the time you invested was wasted. You helped that reporter understand the issue and improved the quality of the report.

Researchers also perform a public service when they write a letter to the editor, even if the letter is never published or aired. The process trains one to express yourself tersely and clearly, and the letter helps educate the people in the newsroom.

Institutions that employ researchers can help too. They should encourage and reward experts who take the time to communicate with the public and participate in public discourse.

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Social technology can transform the way you lead

May 20, 2010

open leadership

Book Review
Open Leadership: How Social Technology can transform the way you lead.
By Charlene Li.
Jossey-Bass, 2010. 290 p.
http://www.charleneli.com/open-leadership/

The world of online social media appeals to many communicators. New tools and toys seem to emerge every month. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other innovations are fun. They have placed more power in the hands of corporate communicators, and in the hands of the publics they need to reach.

Problem is, these innovations challenge traditional communication models, and often make corporate leaders nervous. Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Groundswell (2008), argues eloquently the benefits of opening up to this new communication world.

In Groundswell, Li explored the growing movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need—information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power—from each other.

In Open Leadership, Li challenges us to recognize that a new generation of workers is coming of age that believes “sharingness” is next to—or more important than—godliness. People inside and outside the organization demand more openness about how an organization makes decisions and operates.

Li coined the term ‘open leadership’ to describe those companies and leaders who have the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control. This book picks up where Groundswell left off, by showing readers just how they can use these new technologies—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yammer, Jive, and new mobile services—to improve efficiency, communication, and decision making for themselves and their organizations.

Li has collected hundreds of corporate social media policies and guidelines. (Psst! Wanna see Hill & Knowlton’s social media policy? It’s on p. 127. Or how the U.S. Air Force handles blog comments? That’s on p. 138).

Based on this research Li offers many case studies describing how companies have implemented social media, their setbacks and mistakes, their accomplishments, and the policy changes they had to make.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, one forward looking employee helped the American Red Cross establish its first social media policy. The project succeeded because she put in place the proper procedures, policies, and guidelines that defined how everyone should and shouldn’t behave online.

The first step in opening up, Li says, is for corporate leaders and communicators to recognize that we are not in control – our customers, employees, and partners are.  It seems counterintuitive, but the act of engaging with people, of accepting that they have power, can actually put us in a position to counter negative behavior.

Li offers case studies of companies including Best Buy, Cisco, Dell, Ford, Mozilla, and Procter & Gamble.  P&G developed a new Web site, pgconnectdevelop.com, to highlight research topics they wanted to address and to encourage contributions. The goal was to expand beyond the 200 or so internal scientists at P&G to reach an estimated 1.5 million researchers who were working on related, relevant issues.

Executives reluctant to embrace open leadership often ask Li: What’s the Return on Investment? It’s hard to quantify the value of a relationship, Li says, because that value can be tapped in many different ways. Think about the closest relationships you have in your life. How do you measure their value? Even more to the point, how do you realize the value of being in a relationship?

Open leadership requires creating a structure, process, and discipline around openness when there is none, so that employees and customers know what to expect, and how to behave, in a new open environment. Li recommends developing a “sandbox covenant” to govern how you will enter into these new relationships. Li typically sees two types of covenants. (1) social media guidelines for employees and (2) customer-facing guidelines, such as community participation or comment guidelines, as well as disclosure policies and codes of conduct designed to build trust with an audience.

Open leadership is about building a new kind of relationship with your employees, customers, and partners. In any relationship, things go wrong, mistakes are made, ups are followed by downs. The strength of a relationship is not how perfect it is but how resiliently it deals with the unavoidable downs.

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Talking substance in an age of style

May 20, 2010

don't be such a scientist

Book Review
Don’t Be Such A Scientist:
Talking Substance in An Age of Style
Randy Olson
Island Press, 2009. 206 p.

It takes more than just the straightforward blurting out of facts.

If scientists gather and produce knowledge but can’t, or won’t, communicate their work to others in a compelling form, why even bother to do science?

Science has two parts, the doing and the communicating. Communication has two parts, substance and style.

Randy Olson’s point is particularly compelling, as we live in an age of backlash against science. From evolution to global warming to mainstream medicine, and entire antiscience movement has emerged. Groups of people are fighting against hard, rational data-based science and clinical medicine. They simply don’t care what the science says.

A marine biologist, Olson left a perfectly good professorship to study filmmaking. He wanted to learn storytelling, and to master the secrets of Hollywood, “the most powerful, albeit hard to control, mass communication resource of today.”  (If you haven’t seen it, check out his pointed (and hilarious) video “Talking Science: The Elusive Art of the Science Talk.”)

In the midst of indifference to, and backlash against, science, Olson says, communication is not just one part of making science relevant: It is THE central element.  Unless communicating science receives higher priority, the science community will lose its voice.

Olson’s two careers, science and filmmaking, share a common element: they’re both exercises in storytelling. A scientist goes out into nature, gathers data, comes back to the laboratory, and puts it together to present to the world a story about how things are. A filmmaker goes out into the world, shoots film, comes back to the editing suite, and puts it together to present to the world a story about how life is. “Same basic creative process,” Olson says. “One group just tends to be a little better at the art of storytelling.”

Scientists, being literal minded folk, often think that communicating successfully with the general public means “letting the facts speak for themselves.” Unfortunately, facts need to be marketed. Consider the success of the report of the 9/11 Commission. It didn’t sell itself. The committee members toured the country, lobbied, and eventually testified before Congress. The report It was released as hardcover book and as a book on tape.

Speaking as a scientist, Olson says that marketing and selling take scientists out of their comfort zone. Scientists would rather stick to objective things (science, law, policy) rather than dabbling in the subjective (communicating, lobbying, persuading).

Want an example of how it’s done well? Olson calls Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth “plainly and simply, the most important and best-made piece of environmental media in history. End of story.”

With the advent of such innovations as blogs, video technology, and YouTube, a new day has arrived for scientists. They can themselves “be the voice of science.”  At its best, Olson says, the voice of science was and still is Carl Sagan.  “Given the scale of achievement of his popular books and television series, he is the most successful scientist in recent decades in communicating pure science to the general public.”

Olson does not argue that all scientists should drop everything and go to film school. And his motto “Don’t be such a scientist” does NOT mean to be any less of a scientist than your mind tells you to be. It simply means to develop a new awareness. “You want a healthy, productive life as a scientist? You’ve got to find ways to develop an awareness of the myopic drive and the need to split your attention. In essence, you need to be bilingual. – to be conversant in your area of specialty in both languages, academic and public.

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Forfeiting our Humanity in a Binary World

February 12, 2010

you are not a gadget

Book Review
You are not a gadget: A manifesto
Jaron Lanier
Alfred A. Knopf. 2010. 209 pages.

Jaron Lanier is afraid that we humans are reducing ourselves to fit into a binary straitjacket.

If we are blogging, twittering, and wikiing a lot, he asks, how does that change who we are?  Or, If my audience is the ‘hive mind,’ then who am I?

Lanier laments the increasing use of fragmentary, impersonal communication (e.g., anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and mashups of popular culture). Such fragmentary communication, he says, demeans interpersonal interaction.  A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.

He’s far from a Luddite. Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, musician, and visual artist. His name is often associated with research into “virtual reality,” a term he coined. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first multiperson virtual world using head-mounted displays, for both local and wide-area networks, and the first “avatars,” or representations of users, within such systems.

Lanier says the central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. The abstraction of the network becomes more important than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless.

Lanier is amazingly  well read, and yo support his arguments brings in examples from the fields of education, finance, music, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. This manifesto ranges through the nature of free will, consciousness, the music business, and popular culture.

As a software designer and creator of virtual worlds, Lanier sees the root of dehumanization in the very binary character at the core of software itself.  When scaled up, this binary foundation sets up rigid representations of human relationships. The tinny sounds of MIDI musical notes represent only a fragment of the full sounds created by of acoustic musical instruments. Just as much of music’s essence is lost when reduced to MIDI, we humans set aside much of what is interesting about us when we participate in digital online worlds.

Like Andrew Keen (”The Cult of the Amateur”), Lanier laments the amateurish quality he finds in much content produced for blogs and social network sites. But rather than simply bemoaning a lack of professionalism, he sees a loss of humanity. The most important thing to ask about any technology, he says, is how it changes people. For example, we cheapen the word ‘friend’ when we claim we have accumulated hundreds or thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook.

Millions of consumers use the internet to download endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression. And a few brilliant financiers and speculators used the internet to spin monetary schemes that were too complex to exist in the past. Cloud-based computing allowed  them to create dangerous, temporary illusions of risk-free ways to create money out of thin air. Lanier sees similarities here with consumers’ downloading “free” content. In each case, some people derive short-term benefits, but disaster looms for everyone in the long term. “If we can’t reformulate digital ideals,” he argues, “we will have failed to bring about a better world. Instead we will usher in a dark age in which everything human is devalued.”

The development of connected media technologies brought the promise of new, amazing cultural expression, he says. “Not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds. Not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.” Yet the majority of online communication consists of fans chattering about old-media content: TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games.” At the same time the web is killing the old media,” he says, “popular culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

Lanier says he hopes that his contrarianism will foster an alternative mental environment, where “the exciting opportunity to start creating a new digital humanism can begin.”

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The Backchannel: The elephant in the room

December 28, 2009

Book review
The backchannel: How audiences are using Twitter and social media and changing presentations forever.
Cliff Atkinson.
New Riders, 2010.  222 pages.

You’re comfortable presenting to audiences and you’re well prepared for this conference.  But . . . . A minute into your presentation you notice that many people are busy texting on their mobile phones.  Are they checking email?

They’re certainly preoccupied. They laugh at the wrong time.

Chances are they’re using Twitter to message each other about you and about your presentation. They may love you, or they may be encouraging each other to leave and check out another presentation.

Welcome to the world of the backchannel, where your presentation is only one of the many interesting things going on in the room. In fact, this virtual conversation is not limited to the room. Because Twitter is public and open, anyone can follow or join in the conversation about your presentation, even when they’re in another state or on another continent.

The backchannel is a recent phenomenon. In fact, it’s impressive that a book has been written about it so soon.

A seasoned presenter, Cliff Atkinson provides anecdotes, case studies, a bit of communication theory, and how-to examples, to help you feel more comfortable as a presenter facing this new elephant in the room.

Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points (which I reviewed here) remains an important book on the subject of effective presentations. (It was named a Best Book of 2007 by the editors at Amazon.com.) Now, in The Backchannel, Atkinson describes how to how to prepare for the backchannel, how to make your ideas Twitter-friendly, and how to manage this virtual conversation.

This is an important skill for presenters to learn. At its worst, the backchannel can get out of hand and degenerate into harsh criticism of your presentation in real time. Atkinson provides examples of speakers falling prey to negative comments and how they have succeeded, or failed, in defraying the tension.

On the other hand, speakers can learn how to use the backchannel conversation as a rich source of information that can engage the audience and improve the presentation.

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How to innovate in education

November 10, 2009

disrupting class

Book review
Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns.
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Curtis W. Johnson.
McGraw-Hill, 2008. 238 p.

Last month a group of educators, government leaders, and corporate and foundation representatives huddled to brainstorm about how technology might drive innovation in the nation’s schools. Kathleen Kennedy Manzo reported on the educational technology forum held at Google Inc’s headquarters, where many “acknowledged the challenges of equipping schools and teachers with new equipment and instructional strategies, gauging the progress of new teaching approaches, and scaling up proven strategies” (Education Week, 4 Nov.).

Clayton Christensen and colleagues addressed these concerns in their 2008 book Disrupting Class. The authors reached their conclusions not by studying schools, but rather by studying innovation in business. They stood outside the public education industry to examine its problems from a different perspective.

The five major messages in this book:
1. Few education reforms have addressed the root cause of students’ inability to learn. Most attempts have not been guided by an understanding of the root reasons for why the system functions as it does, or how to predictably introduce innovation into it.
2. School reformers have repeatedly tried to confront the status quo head-on. The authors’ previous studies of innovation showed that direct attacks on existing systems do not lead to effective disruptive innovation. Instead, innovation must go around and underneath the system.
3. We know that all children learn differently, but the way schooling is currently arranged discourages educating children in customized ways. We need a modular system.
4. Emerging online user networks offer a model for circumventing the education system and creating a new, modular system that facilitates customization. Decentralized user networks democratize development and purchase decisions to the end users in the system—in this case students, parents, and teachers.
5. To facilitate innovation administrators will have to use the tools of power and separation. Using these tools is easiest in the chartered and private school sectors.

Online courses offer the kind of customized, student-centric instruction that students most need, Christensen and colleagues argue. They propose that each school designate one person whose sole job is to implement online courses. He or she should not be the chief information officer or info technologies officer. She or he should report directly to the principal or district superintendent. She or he should not have responsibilities for the rest of instruction in the school, but instead should be free to take any steps necessary to import online courses to meet students’ needs.

Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, calls for philanthropies and foundations to fund the kind of research that helps us learn how different people learn, how to identify those differences, and how different students can best educate themselves and each other.

Teacher training colleges take note: Future teachers will need skills to work one-on-one with different types of learners as they study in a student-centric way. Graduate schools of education must train researchers to go beyond doing descriptive research that seeks average tendencies. Instead, they should study the anomalies and outliers, where the richest insight often is found.

Teachers and parents: When your school does not offer a course students need, seek them online and demand that their schools accept them for credit.

“Schooling can and should be an intrinsically motivating experience,” Christensen says. Why has this often not been the case? How to resolve these problems? Explaining why and how is the purpose of this book.

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People first, business later

August 28, 2009

trust agents

Book Review
Trust Agents. Using the Web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust.
By Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2009. 271 p.

Because I read Trust Agents from the perspective of a public relations practitioner I especially appreciate its challenge to reconsider the meaning of the term ‘public relations.’ Chris Brogan and Julien Smith emphasize that PR means listening.

PR people, successful ones at least, learn to become part of a dialogue with a number of  communities, online and off. They volunteer to help whenever possible, and keep adding to the karma bank.

Chris Brogan is an author, a cofounder of PodCamp, and an unusually influential blogger on trends in social media. I have followed him for some  time. Julien Smith is an author, trend analyst, and consultant.

They address Trust Agents to marketers in particular.  As marketing professionals themselves, they critique many common practices of the profession and propose enlightened alternatives. They offer the book as a marketer’s guide to establishing credibility, and they take cues from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Boy Scout Manual, a Guy’s Guide to Dating.

Like a single guy scanning attractive prospects at the local pub, a Trust Agent sees sales opportunities. But rather than incessantly promoting himself (or product) he takes his time and nurtures relationships. He patiently plants seeds. Through blog posts and comments, interactions online and face-to-face, and by going the extra mile for customers, the Trust Agent eventually reaps rewards as the seeds bloom.

Trust Agents embody six qualities, and each receives its own chapter:
They make their own game (enjoy experimentation, learn from trial and error)
Are ‘one of us’ (spend time with us, are genuine)
Use the Archimedes effect (leverage one success to create another)
Act as Agent Zero (bring networks together and build relationships long before business needs transacting)
Are human artists (good at ‘people skills,’ empower others)
Build an army (work with their networks to achieve monumental tasks)

Clever Trust Agents ‘make their own game’ by sizing up the system, the status quo. They identify its underlying assumptions and then decide which rules can be broken. They jump the gate; they hack the system;  they do something unique. At the same time, and this is crucial, Trust Agents do not take advantage of people. People are real, they have feelings, and deserve respect. Trust Agents watch their own ego. They promote others more often than they promote themselves.

While they’re eager to participate in networks and groups, Trust Agents are not phony. They don’t join a community they don’t care about. There is no worse crime than being fake.

You may find yourself skimming over some of the content. Several of the observations and recommendations are so obvious and so universally accepted that one wonders why they’re repeated here:  how to conduct oneself in social settings, how to use social networking sites to build social networks.

But for this reader there are some big takeaways: Keep experimenting. Keep trying new things. If you stumble, learn from the experience. It’s part of creating your own game.

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Make Bank … by Giving It Away

August 4, 2009

Free the future of a radical price

Book Review
Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
By Chris Anderson
Hyperion books, 2009.  274 pages.

NPR reported this morning that Microsoft will soon offer free web based versions of some of its software programs, including word processing and spreadsheets.

Why would Microsoft  give anything away free? After all, about 80 percent of business uses Microsoft Office.

Their decision has as much to do with mindshare as much as market share, says NPR commentator  Mario Armstrong.

More people are using Google Docs, a free online application, for collaborative word processing. The software exists not in your computer, but on the internet.

MS needs to show it can be an online presence, Armstrong says.  If people get used to free alternatives and MS does not have a complementary service, people will forget about MS:  MS could become unnecessary.

OK, but how does Google make money with online free apps?  They are still trying to figure that out.

But companies are making money with Free. Chris Anderson lists 50 ways they do that in Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

While the last century’s Free was a powerful marketing method, this century’s Free is an entirely new economic model, Anderson says.  The new form of Free is not a gimmick, not just a trick to shift money from one pocket to another. Instead, it’s driven by an extraordinary ability of bits and bytes to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero.

The most disruptive way to enter a market is to vaporize the economics of existing business models, Anderson says. Charge nothing for a product that the incumbents depend on for their profits (e.g., a web browser, photo imaging software). The world will beat a path to your door. And then you can sell them something else.

The Firefox browser continues to gain on Microsoft’s IE (it now has about 30 percent of the market). Mozilla, the nonprofit company that makes it, funds the browser’s development almost entirely with a cut of Google’s ad revenues. When people use Firefox for search, they get Google’s search results page. Mozilla’s staff is fewer than a hundred people, yet it’s running circles around Microsoft’s browser team, Anderson says. It’s another business built on Free, no tie-in to a commercial operating system required.

Free is easier for newcomers than for incumbents because the incumbents haven a revenue stream that they’re in danger of cannibalizing. They also have a lot more users, and the costs of serving millions of customers can be astronomical.

Anderson describes how Free has changed the world of advertising. The old broadcast model was: Annoy the 90 percent of your audience that’s not interested in your product to reach the 10 percent who might be.  The Google model is just the opposite: Use software to show your ad only to the people for whom it’s most relevant. Annoy just the 10 percent of the audience who isn’t interested to reach the 90 percent who might be.  Google has redefined advertising—connecting products with expressed desires.

Anderson cautions that Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert into cash the reputation and attention you can get from Free.

But remember that people will pay to save time. People will pay to lower risk. People will pay for things the love. People will pay for status. People will pay if you make them (once they’re hooked). Free opens doors and reaches new consumers, Anderson says. With today’s economies of scale, you can make plenty of money by charging just a small fraction of them.

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Teaching Digital Citizenship in Schools

July 30, 2009

digital citizenship

Book Review
Digital Citizenship in Schools
Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey
International Society for Technology in Education/ISTE, 2007.  149 p.

Technology offers powerful tools that allow students to communicate and, ultimately, create society.  Students need to understand that digital technology makes them citizens of the world. Teachers therefore have to engage digital technology in the same way their students already do.

But too often, technology is seen as another class that students go to, as opposed to being an integral part of the larger curriculum.

In Digital Citizenship in Schools, Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey offer a framework for district- or site-based teams to understand digital citizenship and how it can affect their curriculum and school. It’s written primarily for educators and technology leaders.

Ribble is is an educator and author; Bailey is an author and professor of educational administration and leadership. Both specialize in technology leadership and staff development.

Ribble and Bailey structure the book around ‘nine elements of digital citizenship’ to help educators better understand the variety of topics that constitute digital citizenship and to provide an organized way to address them.

The nine elements are:  digital access, digital commerce, communication, literacy, etiquette, law, rights and responsibilities, health and wellness, and digital security.  They relate to each other in a number of ways and they fall into three categories:

• Elements that directly affect student learning and academic performance

• Elements that affect the overall school environment and student behavior, and

• Elements that affect student life outside the school environment

Chapter 4 provides 16 activities designed to give teachers, staff, and administrators a better understanding of digital citizenship and its implementation in a school or district.

Chapter 6 presents five foundational lesson plans that teachers can use to teach the fundamental principles of digital citizenship. Guided lesson plans cover topics including cell phone interruptions, how businesses use technology, creating and using mp3 files for teaching and learning, cyber bullying, plagiarism, purchasing items online, and file sharing.

Following each section is a list of web based resources for digital literacy.

The authors emphasize that it’s also important to educate parents about digital citizenship. Parents can help teachers provide a consistent message to students.

It’s critical for educators to take the lead in this issue, the authors say. Without such education, students will find it much more difficult to  become productive digital citizens, and our society will be diminished for it.

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