This quote comes from a blogger I've been following, Ana Cristina (check out her blog CristinaSkyBox), in her post titled Shackled to the Web. I found this post to be extremely relevant to topics we've discussed in our "Teaching with Technology" class about digital natives and our role as teachers to help students understand their digital responsibilities. I felt that this quote adequately summed up one of the major themes that comes with a lesson of this type and that is to remember that whatever you post online is available to everyone, all the time, basically forever.
Within her post, she talks about how students don't always remember this and they end up saying or publishing things that they believe to be okay in their "digital world" but that everyone knows is something you would never do in person. The challenge for us as teachers who teach digital responsibility is then to help the students understand, that even though these interactions are occurring face to face, they are still coming from the same origin-you! And the digital world is less forgiving than the so-called "real word" because what happens there could be tied to you forever.
I found it really interesting that she also talked about this generation of students as the generation of learners. She made the point that although students may have made mistakes, she would hope that people in the future wouldn't hold it against them as a person, but understand that they were involved in this learning process of managing their etiquette in two worlds. I had never thought of it this way before. I think I grew up somewhat during the begininng of the popularity of the digital world (instant messaging, email, myspace, Facebook, etc.), my parents always telling me to never put any important information on the web, no pictures, nothing that would have people knowing anything about me. I actually never had a myspace, had limited time allotted to use instant messaging, and didn't have a Facebook until college because of this skepticism. I feel like I am still very reluctant to create accounts or profiles online and I acknowledge the fact that online image is an important part of what people see about you. But since this is so much a part of our world now, and students younger and younger have technology, when students don't know their responsibilities and things end up online, will people view this as a negative part of their history, or part of the learning process of our society in the digital world we are now adapting to?
Either way, I think her post brought up great points about the continued need to help students understand that although they live in essentially two worlds (the "real" world and the "digital" ones), it is necessarily to incorporate it into our classrooms but also to make sure students understand how they exists in both worlds.