I'm currently reading Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry Jenkins [et al.], one of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning.

We hear so much about digital natives, and the fact that today's young people have grown up with the Internet, but research is proving a fact that school librarians have known for some time: that young people may spend a lot of time online, but that does not mean they have the knowledge of how to find the best resources, know how to reflect and upon what they have found, or how to cope with the ethics of the social environment they find online.

Our current push with our library curriculum involves writing Internet safety and cyber bullying lessons for the full spectrum of our K-12 public school educational offerings, so I picked up the digital book (free at the time I downloaded it from Amazon) with the idea that it would offer insights into teaching children how to use social media in ways that would not infringe upon their privacy and would teach proper social media interaction (i.e., not using it to spread meanness, rumor, innuendo). So far, however, the report is dealing with the issue of equality of access to digital media, and the inequities of children's educations if they do not have access to a computer and the Internet.

The next section of the report deals with the so-called "transparency" problem, involving assessing the quality of information that is found online. This is the kind of teaching we librarians do in school, trying to teach how to read the Web site to determine its purpose, and whether it is commercial or non-commercial, and why they might be trying to sway the reader's thoughts. Advertising on the Web is not as obvious as it is in the TV commercials that interrupt the entertaining parts of the television programming.

Then there's the question of ethics, especially when cut-and-paste is such an easy way to throw together a report. Ethics also enters into the use of social media. It is easy to lie about oneself when posting to MySpace or Facebook, or in chat rooms. We need to make students understand the importance of ethical conduct online as well as in their offline real lives.