Digital Citizenship Exercises

Many years ago the authors defined a layered model that takes into account every aspect of Digital Citizenship. The “Digital Citizenship and Technocivism Rainbow” (DCTR) model slices the topic in eight coloured levels (network, services, access, education, transparency, participation, consultation, democracy) that can be used in teaching (to organize course materials) and when analysing “situations” (e.g., public participation initiatives/actions) to better comprehend intents with “digital citizenship spectrograms”. This model has been in constant use at the Computer Science department (University of Milan) Digital Citizenship course. An issue in teaching the course and in explaining the topic to common people is the lack of exercises. During the 2021- 2022 session students were assigned a new type of homework: they had to create exercises to help common people understand Digital Citizenship. The task consisted in proposing and developing complete exercises with details about: intended target, difficulty level, detailed instructions and so on. This paper describes the work they produced, with an analysis w.r.t. the DCTR model. The main idea is to evaluate the effort of inventing exercises at various levels. A significant result is that “participatory levels” are challenging when trying to design digital citizenship exercises.