On Wednesday afternoon at ULearn I had the privilege of attending the launch of a set of guidelines for teachers on Digital Citizenship. The launch was held, very appropriately, at the National Library's Auckland Service Centre, a wonderfully 'future-focused' building reflecting how libraries and learning should be approaching the 21st century!

The story of how these guidelines were created was recounted by project initiator, Claire Amos (centre above), currently (but not for long) the eLearning director at Epsom Girl's Grammar School. Claire spoke about how she, in her role as eLearning director, felt she needed to have such a set of guidelines in place for her staff, but that on her own, and within the limit of her own resources, wasn't able to fully bring them together.

That's when the idea of initiating a 'community' approach to developing the guidelines was initiated – with an email sent around a mailing list subscribed to by many like-minded people. The initial idea was to co-create the guidelines using a simple Google-doc and Google-sites, but after a strong push by one of the key contributors, Mark Osborne (pictured left above) to ensure that the guidelines were developed in an 'open source' manner and available to all from the outset, the decision was made to development in Wikieducator, under a Creative Commons license. 

The result is an impressively useful and practical set of guidelines that is organised into sections for primary, intermediate and secondary teachers, and contains everything from simple definitions to practical advice and guidance that has been borne out of the experience of those working in schools with students. 

I applaud this initiative and recommend the guidelines to every school/teacher.