Digital Citizenship Summit 2017, Session 1: What is Digital Citizenship? Why does it matter?

By EPIK Alliance | February 6, 2018

Session 1: What is Digital Citizenship? Why does it matter?

After the kickoff from Marialice Curran and Mike Ribble (pioneers in the Digital Citizenship sphere), we launched right into the first session of the Summit.

The topic of this session was “What is Digital Citizenship? Why does it matter?” Digital Citizenship is a concept understood by many in the education sector, but often people outside that sector don’t know what Digital Citizenship is. We wanted to start the Summit expanding to add perspectives of people from other sectors (e.g., nonprofit, business, government, STEM, etc.) and include youth and parent perspectives as well. The hope is to invite people from other sectors to join the education sector to help expand conversations and impact culture around issues related to kids and technology.

Participants on this panel included the following. (We’ve included a brief explanation as to why each was asked to be on the panel._

Dani Sloan, president of the Utah Coalition of Education Technology (UCET) and a trainer in the Utah Education Network. She was invited to help represent an education sector perspective, and also was invited because she and her colleagues at UCET understand the importance of collaborating with others.
Kemi Olurinola (who came all the way from Nigeria for the Summit!) also represented the education sector and was invited to bring an international perspective and voice to the panel.
Carrie Rogers-Whitehead interfaces a lot with the STEM world in Utah and does research about Digital Citizenship. She was invited to talk to why tech companies and those who care about STEM should also care about Digital Citizenship.
Becca Linford is a high school student (one of the two students on this panel) who was one of the youth involved in helping plan the Summit.
Mark Babbitt (from Colorado) was on the panel to represent the business sector and also to speak to civic and other influencers and why they should care about Digital Citizenship.
Curran Dee is an elementary student who, working alongside his mom (Marialice Curran), has a lot of life experience with using technology to build connections across the world.
Jeremy Bond came from New York ready to talk about why and how parents can be more deliberate about their use of technology, and why they should care about Digital Citizenship.
Dina Alexander is a nonprofit founder from Texas who has caught the vision of why Digital Citizenship matters; she’s really taking the Positive Digital Citizenship vision and running with it in her nonprofit work.
Adam Moore is a therapist who is seeing the impacts in the lives of adults with negative problems of technology (specifically pornography) and he came to the panel as someone who knows that there is more to digital health than preventing the bad. He sees Digital Citizenship as a way to expand such conversations.
Keven Stratton is the legislator in Utah who sponsored HB213, the first Digital Citizenship bill in the United States. He values a collaborative approach, which is what enabled EPIK to help contribute to the creation of the language of that bill.

Below, you can find the full video from Session 1, as well as the individual speaker videos and the Q&A after the panel.

Full Session 1 Video: