Digital Communication and Collaboration

Digital communication and collaboration involve using technology to communicate with others. Students use digital communication to express themselves as scholars and people.

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Buchanan, R., Southgate, E., & Smith, S. P. (2019). ‘The whole world’s watching really’: Parental and educator perspectives on managing children’s digital lives. Global Studies of Childhood, 9(2), 167-180.

In this article, the authors reported on the Best Footprint Forward project which is a project that took place in Australia to understand the awareness parents and teachers had about children's digital footprints. Findings from that study indicate that parents and teachers struggle with having to manage children's online lives as well as their in-person lives. A theme of transition was noticed in the data. This included children's transitions as they age, teacher's transitions in workload as students engage with more technology, and a transition into a digital era. To address the concerns around the many changes that are occuring with the use of technology, the authors proposed the use of an ethical framework to make decisions. Specifically, the authors suggested using the ethical principles of respect, benefit, and justice.

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Budd, J. M. (2022). The Library as forum in the Social Media Age. Rowman & Littlefield.

This recent work discussed the importance of the library in political conversations, as a contrast to discussions on social media. As a forum for knowledge, libraries provide many spaces and resources to support discourse and civil conversations. This book is framed in discourse theory, and explains how communities can use libraries as a space for informed and rational political conversations. 

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Gleason, B. (2018). Thinking in hashtags: Exploring teenagers’ new literacies practices on Twitter. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(2), 165-180.

This author closely examined three high school students and their participation on teenage Twitter for 2-years. They found that by using Twitter, the teenagers learned many practices which helped them to mobilize their own followers for events and learned to tell stories about their life. This led to the development of nonlinear and emergent thinking and showed strong social and cultural connections. The author concluded that learning about hashtags and communicating on social media is an important life skill for teens.

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Gleason, B., & Von Gillern, S. (2018). Digital citizenship with social media: Participatory practices of teaching and learning in secondary education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 200-212.

Authors presented how a social media-enabled digital citizenship approach was examined to understand more about how teenagers develop digital citizenship when using Twitter. They found that teenagers used social media to document their own political and community service activity, developed public service announcements as part of a class project, and used Twitter to form their own political networks. This use of social media for digital citizenship demonstrated how teenagers use social media for enhancing civic education in schools, and to develop their own politics to engage in their communities. Authors conclude that teachers can co-learn alongside students as well as provide them with opportunities to center student experiences, culture, and online lives by offering activities and assignments that utilize social media.

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Goldberg, R., & Effinger, J. (2021). It's a small world after all. Science and Children, 58(6), 26-29.

The authors shared how their school district implemented a global collaborative STEM project for students to engage in communication and project work in a global world. Specifically, one fourth-grade class in Texas and one fourth-grade class in Australia collaborated on a project titled "Understanding Forces Help Us to Predict the World Around Us." This was a STEM project where students designed a project and then the other class completed it. The authors of the article describe the project and how the classes communicated. Additionally, the authors shared about how the project was implemented and feedback that was received.

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LeBlanc, M., Furlong, C., Leger, M. T., & Freiman, V. (2018). Digital citizenship in a global context: The relationships between young people and the digital world, the actions they take and the issues associated with those actions. Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 363-371). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

This paper examined the problem of how an educational system should prepare a student to be a digital citizen. A systematic literature review (also referred to as a knowledge synthesis study in the paper) was conducted to identify a new model of the digital citizen which includes hard and soft skills, legal aspects and security, the social aspect and the personal aspect. 

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Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.

In this book, Noble explained how the algorithms behind search engines privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color. After analyzing many textual searches using popular search engines, Noble exposed how many search results (and advertising) produce biased results and disseminate racism amongst internet users. 

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Proszek, J. M. (2019). Developing a digital voice: Embedding digital communication networks, platforms, and technologies in the 21st-Century classroom. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 2, 127-133.

This paper presented ten recommended practices for enhancing students' digital media literacy across various communication situations in a university level communications course. These best practices include: 1.) promote media literacy, 2.) incorporate digital technologies into class discussions and activities, 3.) reimagine public address, 4.) build electronic portfolios, 5.) incorporating video platforms, 6.) assess the dynamics of the digital audience, 7.) create course specific social media accounts, 8.) discuss digital identities, 9.) analyze misleading articles and sources, and 10.) build library partnerships. 

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Sweeney, M. E., & Whaley, K. (2019). Technically white: Emoji skin-tone modifiers as American technoculture. First Monday, 24(7).

This study explored the emoji as a cultural artifact. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the authors analyzed public discourse (blogs, forums, editorials, and comments) to understand how people were using the skin-tone modifier options of emojis. They found that white commentators were more likely to describe ideologies of whiteness and technical neutrality, while BIPOC commentators used them for expanded representation, often within the context of culturally specific discussions of race and racism.