Participate

Participate:

To complete this Quest:

Create a blog post which describes the three most impressive character traits of an exemplary citizen within a digital learning community. In particular, the shared post should explain what makes each of those characteristics worthy of recognizing and emulating.

Okey dokey. You'll note that my blogging voice is somewhat informal. That's on purpose, based on years experience working on said voice. That said, let's talk about the three most impressive traits of an exemplary citizen within a digital learning community. 

I examined, to varying degrees of depth, all the resources listed in the Participation Quest "Resources for Exploration. I'd like to vamp off of the little section on Digital Citizenship at the ISTE Standards site. Here's that section, copied from the .pdf file via .jpg.:

Image capture from ISTE Standards for Teachers at http://www.iste.org/standards/ISTE-standards/standards-for-teachers

The keywords that underlie the three most impressive traits are in that "a." section: "safe, legal, and ethical." These descriptors highlight the traits in ways I'll describe here.

1. Safe--An exemplary citizen models being safe in online community(ies). Never sharing a phone number or even a school name is central to safety for a student collaborating with unknown others online. On the other hand, communicating with other students in discussions and via emails is perfectly all right, even encouraged. Communication helps build community, especially when it is carried out with skill and kindness. Being safe carries its own reward, that of course being safety from internet predators (in my humble opinion, a threat overemphasized--however for those who have been victimized, some emphasis on the topic may have helped protect them), and is clearly worth of being emulated.
2. Legal--An online community member never copies and pastes from either the internet or others' work without properly attributing the author and/or the source. I like to remind students that in most cases it's okay to copy and paste, but one must use a citation format defined by one's teacher, and further, that a student should analyze and contribute to any quote with thoughtfulness and originality. Otherwise it's just a rubber stamp. In order to avoid the huge ramifications that being outed for cheating (intentionally or otherwise), let's encourage students to stay legal--including modeling citations and thoughtful analyzation. 
3. Ethical--One must always consider the feelings of others, and kindness must be a driving force. The plagiarism question comes into play here, too. The core if ethics is right and wrong, and both are not only fairly easy to determine in online communities. I used to tell my 3rd graders that the key to living is summed up in the phrase "Be Good and Have Fun," and if you are doing only one but not the other, you need to work on that until you are. As William James replied to his nephew when asked for a school assignment "What does it mean to be a human being?," "There are three answers to that question, my son. The first is 'to be kind;' the second is 'to be kind.' And the third? Why, of course, 'to be kind.'"

That's my story for the Participate Quest, and I'm sticking to it.