Digital Competencies for Digital Citizenship of pre-teen children: some reflections for librarians. #lilac19

Pam McKinney live-blogging from the final day of the LILAC conference. This morning the first session is led by Konstatina Martzoukou, Teaching excellence fellow from Rober Gordon University. The session began with a brief introduction to children’s activities online, with some data from OFCOM about children’s media use at home from 2007-2017. We looked at the data for pre-teens, children aged 8-11 where mobile phone use is increasing.  There is a moral panic about mobile phone use by young children, with threats to safety of personal information and sexual predators, the difficulty for parents in managing online behaviour and concerns over screen time. It is much more difficult to find positive aspects of children being online in the literature, but children can build themselves as digital citizens, and socialise, play and learn online. Games can be quite controversial, some are fun and creative, but some can be violent and introduce morally questionable activities e.g. stealing. Games have settings for different age of children. We looked at the Tik Tok app where users can create videos of themselves lip synching to popular music. The EU has recommended that only children over 16 use this app because of the sexualised content. There is also an issue of the app promoting gender stereotypes.

Then we watched a video “Maddie is online” which introduced us to a scenario where a pre-teen child uses the Tik Tok app and posts content online of herself and receives negative comments on her video from a friend of a friend. We were asked to discuss this scenario and come up with a course of action as a parent. We chose option 3 - Maddie should go to mum and ask her what to do. However this option did not turn out well! It turns out that many of the options lead to more complications, and revealed the complexity of the situation.

Social media interactions can be tricky for younger children, are they too immature for social media? It’s important to make children aware of the importance of personal information, and parents should use the controls that are available to them. Dina showed us an example of a family agreement where members of a family can agree on their internet and social media use.  As with many other aspects of like, it’s important to keep lines of communication between parents and children open. The uk council for child internet safety has useful advice. The software “Plotagon” was used to create the videos. Dina highlighted the role that school librarians can play in being the digital lead, and monitor and share research in the field.