Digital Rights and Responsibility

Digital rights and responsibility refer to the requirements and freedoms which extend to everyone in the digital world.

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Dennen, V. P. (2015). Technology transience and learner data: Shifting notions of privacy in online learning. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 16(2), 45–49.

Online learning technologies are constantly improving, offering teachers and students a steady supply of new tools, features, and functionality for current ones. Using these tools, teachers and students produce and exchange a massive quantity of data throughout an online course. Unfortunately, these data are frequently developed in environments where privacy concerns and controls are in flux. This article explores online privacy challenges and emerging solutions in online learning situations where technological transience is prevalent. It focuses on legal rights, difficulties created by evolving educational technology, and ways for institutions, teachers, and students to manage security concerns and the amount of human discomfort these risks entail. Individual privacy can be challenging to protect due to technology transience, especially when mixed with a desire to be inventive and engaging. There are three layers of accountability for protecting privacy in online learning. To begin, schools should give leadership and teaching to both professors and students, emphasizing the importance of privacy as a right and a goal. Should voice their concerns and assist institutions and instructors in developing policies to guide the instructional use of new and emerging technologies and security techniques for employing new and emerging technology to support learning activities.

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Fedders, B. (2019). The constant and expanding classroom: Surveillance in K-12 public schools. North Carolina Law Review, 97(6), 1673–1726.

This article offered three additions to the increasing literature on the surveillance state by using North Carolina's public schools as a case study. It provided a thorough typology that depicts the whole scope of student surveillance. Second, it outlines crucial procedural and substantive challenges to student surveillance that legislators should consider but do not. Third, it offered guidelines for selecting, implementing, and overseeing student surveillance. New technologies enhance schools' ability to monitor kids both inside and outside the classroom during and after the school year. Schools have embraced a bewildering assortment of new technologies with breakneck speed. Digital learning devices that record and retain student data, anonymous tip lines that encourage students to report on one another, and software that watches students' emails and social media posts, even when authored from home, are just a few examples. In addition, this information is accessible to an increasing number of police officers stationed in schools, adding to the technology's potency. Advocates of these technologies claim that they increase student safety and learning results; however, the evidence for this claim is poor, as this article exposes. Furthermore, politicians have ignored critical countervailing factors such as student privacy and its importance for child development, unequal effect, particularly for poor, Black, and LGBTQ students, and possible liability for school administrators.

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Hsin, L. B., Mu, N., & Selman, R. L. (2021). Rights and responsibilities with tech: Students’ take on classroom policies. The Reading Teacher, 74(5), 549–558. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1986

The article depicted pre-teen students' perspectives on an issue of everyday importance: the freedom to use and the duty not to abuse digital technology in the classroom. For example, after a hypothetical cyberbullying event, researchers examined students' writing in grades 4–7 in response to an essay prompt on classroom iPad (tablet computer) use, focusing on students' remedies to avoid a repeat offense. The solutions were divided into six categories, each of which exemplified one of two approaches to the problem: one focused on limiting device access, while the other placed responsibility for responsible device usage on the students themselves. In light of their social perspective-taking skills and grade level, we investigated students' concentration on rights or obligations. The findings show that wrestling with pressing, personally relevant social and moral issues boosts analytic and writing abilities. In their writings, most students (73%) argued that the administrator should restore iPad permits to the pupils, while 25% agreed with the administration's decision to expel them from school; the other 2% of students' positions were unclear. Interestingly, regardless of their viewpoint, 76 percent of students admitted to at least one difficulty that the usage of iPads in school caused, suggesting that even those who disagreed with the principal's new policy understood why they implemented it.

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Kammer, J., & Hays, L. (2021). Coding in school libraries: Considering an ethical approach. Education Libraries, 44(1), 1-16.

This review article explored the different ways that coding is taught in school libraries as a strategy for improving students' basic computer skills. The authors described why it is important to learn coding in school library settings, and discuss ethical implications to learning coding without simultaneously learning about information ethics. Teaching coding with information ethics frameworks, like ethical decision-making models, can help students to think deeper about the ethical implications of technology.

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Kazerooni, F., Taylor, S. H., Bazarova, N. N., & Whitlock, J. (2018). Cyberbullying bystander intervention: The number of offenders and retweeting predict likelihood of helping a cyberbullying victim. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 23(3), 146-162.

The authors of this experimental study discussed the cyber-bystander effect, the experience of witnessing cyberbullying, and provided several intervention strategies to use when confronting cyberbullying. To understand how people might respond to cyberbullying, researchers gave participants scenarios of cyberbullying and examined when they intervened. They found that as the number of instances of cyberbullying increased, feelings were hurt more. In addition, people were more likely to intervene when they witnessed four or more instances of cyberbullying than just one. They also presented several unique findings from their research that explain more about the nature of cyberbullying, including that people are more likely to intervene in online cyberbullying when several offenders are involved.

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Mattson, K. (2021). Ethics in a digital world. International Society of Technology for Education (ISTE). 

In this book, the author explained how educators for grades 6-12 can prepare students to be empathetic and critical thinkers. Chapters in this book addressed privacy, mental health, productivity, bias and social media by explaining the arguments and curricular connections. The author provides questions and scenarios for students to consider to help them think more critically. 

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Moorefield-Lang, H. M. (2015). User agreements and makerspaces: A content analysis. New Library World, 116(7/8), 358-368.

This article examined multifunctional user agreements of makerspaces in public and university libraries. User agreements, sometimes known as maker agreements, user forms, or responsibility forms, are binding contracts that library users, employees, and professors must sign to use the makerspace. After analyzing 24 user agreements in public and academic makerspaces, the author found that many were 6-12 months old, and included liability waivers, permissions for minors, safety, copyright and technology replacement costs.

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​​Souza, R. R. (2018). Algorithms, future and digital rights: Some reflections. Education for Information, 34(3), 179-183.

The purpose of this article was to provide a quick overview of current societal trends, focusing on the technological components brought by the significant data phenomena, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. It discusses the dangers that public ignorance of these problems poses to privacy and human rights and advocates for a conversation on educational objectives and new digital literacy. The author recommended that school curricula be redesigned to teach digital rights.

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Tynes, B. M., Del Toro, J., & Lozada, F. T. (2015). An unwelcomed digital visitor in the classroom: The longitudinal impact of online racial discrimination on academic motivation. School Psychology Review, 44(4), 407–424. https://doi.org/10.17105/SPR-15-0095.1

This research sought to identify longitudinal associations between online racial descrimination on academic motivation among African American and Latino youth. To examine the impact of online racial discrimination on academic motivation the researchers used data from a subsample of a previous research study that was conducted called the Teen Life Online and in Schools Project (TLOS). The TLOS project was a mixed method longitudinal study. Results from the analysis of the data found that youth who experienced higher levels of online racial discrimination experienced decreased levels of academic motivation. One interesting finding is that youth with the highest initial academic motivation reported the highest levels of online racial discriminination. This study is one of the early studies examining online experiences with real-world impact. The results lay the foundation for why it is necessary to consider students' experiences online and how those experiences impact their learning.