A new casebook of curricular materials addresses an acute need of young people for mentorship in their online lives. Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World aims to help young people grappling with how to act ethically and do the “right thing” when confronted with the opportunities and risks of new digital media.

Researchers at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism worked for three years to develop the curriculum, which guides high school students toward taking an ethical course through their digital lives. It is designed to encourage students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments such as Facebook, YouTube, online games and blogs.

The curriculum contains role-playing activities and reflective exercises that invite youth to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people online, and whether they behave ethically themselves online. These are raised in relation to five core themes and units in the curriculum: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.

All curricular units and lessons are free and available for download. For more information, visit: http://www.goodworkproject.org/practice/our-space/ or http://newmedialiteracies.org/our-space-being-a-responsible.php

With funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media & Learning initiative, Our Space was developed by The GoodPlay Project and Project New Media Literacies. Led by Howard Gardner, the GoodPlay Project is a research project focused on digital ethics and housed at Project Zero, the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Led by Henry Jenkins, Project New Media Literacies was established at MIT and is now housed at the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Our Space is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/