Personal Cyberinfrastructure for Middle School?

I have a pair of tweens at home. The younger one went to a 100 girls of code workshop this week. Since the focus of the introductory level is putting together a web page, I decided it was time to unpark domains for her and her brother that I’ve been sitting on for about a year.

This raises the question, “What do I want my kids to know about digital footprint/ cyber infrastructure /etc?” I threw this out into social media and haven’t gotten much response yet, so as an exercise I’m imagining what a MOOC on these topics, designed for middle school age students, might be like.

I imagine three sections

  1. Why

I like Gardner Campbell’s (in)famous “bags of gold” presentation and Eben Moglen’s warnings about PHP doodads to introduce this, but I’m not 12. Perhaps there are gentler introductions.

2 What

At this point I see the MOOC becoming more rhizomatic. Each participant needs to decide what they want their digital identity to represent. Family history buffs might install a genealogy web app. Students might have a bookmark manager, and so forth.

  1. How

Finally, learners put their plans into action. They choose their tools and learn to use them.

This is a very rough first outline. I’ve posted it at my fedwiki site, so you may fork there or comment here. What did I forget? What would you use to deliver such a thing?

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