Why Is the Digital Citizenship Summit in West Hartford, Connecticut?
West Hartford, Connecticut has played an outsize role in influencing the national conversation on digital citizenship. It serves as the home to institutions and thinkers that have been integral in pushing the topic forward, along with shaping the overall conversation.
Despite its reputation as a somewhat upscale cosmopolitan town of 63,000 located next to the State’s capital, it has also become a hotbed of activity towards improving our tech and Internet use. The University of Saint Joseph, an early adopter for teaching digital citizenship, and The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, the first center of its kind, call West Hartford home.
Since 2010, Dr. Marialice B.F.X. Curran, an Associate Professor in the School of Education. Curran has created and taught two digital citizenship courses (#ed210 & #ed536). Curran and Tracy Mercier co-founded the first digital citizenship #digcit chat on Twitter. The first #digcit chat happened in #ed536 and originally started as an opportunity to connect teacher candidates with other educators passionate about digital citizenship. Since 2011, it has grown into an influential weekly conversation that connects educators, administrators, organization and industry leaders, parents, and students from around the world. Both Curran and Mercier have been recognized as digital citizenship bloggers to follow by Common Sense Media.
Curran also taught a First Year Seminar in fall 2011, “Pleased to Tweet You: Are You a Socially Responsible Digital Citizen?” The iCitizen Project was a direct result of the seminar and inspired to plan and host an iCitizenship Town Hall Meeting on campus in February 2012 for a live and virtual audience.
The seed for the Digital Citizenship Summit was originally planted in April 2014. A fortuitous tweet from about the #digcit chat was sent to Dr. Curran and David Ryan Polgar, an educator, attorney, and frequent tech commentator garnishing national media attention. The tweet, sent from an organization out in California, introduced Curran (teaching at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford) and Polgar (a West Hartford resident). That’s the beauty of the Internet: two individuals working on digital citizenship in West Hartford, CT were connected via a tweet sent from California. Both Curran and Polgar commented that there was a need to not only connect everyone concerned with digital citizenship online, but also to congregate in a physical location.
In early December 2014, Curran and Polgar met for coffee at Cafe Sofia in West Hartford to bat around ideas for a unique, first-of-its-kind conference that would take the various thought leaders on digital citizenship and put them all in the same room. Both of them saw a glaring problem happening: various individuals and groups were promoting digital citizenship concepts in various parts of the country, but the groups and individuals did not often pool their resources and ideas together. The message wasn’t amplified. There was a lack of solidarity. Great work that was being developed often stayed localized based on its inability to cross-pollinate.
What if all of those wonderful organizations and individuals got together to discuss, network, and present bold concepts on digital citizenship?
Like a lot of great ideas, this one was born over coffee. With the foundation already established Curran and Polgar meet soon after to form The Digital Citizenship Summit, LLC.
The Digital Citizenship Summit (aka #digcitsummit) serves as an natural extension to bring together thought leaders across the country, amplify the message that digital citizenship is essential in education and parenting, and to craft new messages and ideas to push digital citizenship into the future.
Digital Citizenship Summit 