Expert insights into education for positive digital footprint development

Children and young people are spending more time online. Face-to-face interactions with friends are being supplemented with digital communication. Australian children are particularly prolific users of the internet (Green et al, 2011). This online activity creates digital footprints. Digital footprint refers to the information and data that people generate, through purposive action or passive recording, when they go online (Thatcher, 2014). Digital footprints now play a role in people’s employment and educational opportunities (Black and Johnson, 2010). In this context not having a digital footprint can be as serious as having a badly managed one. One way to address this is for schools to explicitly teach students how to develop positive digital footprints that will help, rather than hinder, them in the future. Many schools have yet to respond to the challenge of helping students develop reputational management skills. Schools are caught between children’s and adolescents’ existing social and recreational uses of the internet and their responsibility to protect their students both on and off line (Luke et al., 2017). On the one hand, schools are tasked with giving students 21st century skills - the knowledge and practices required for participation and success in a technological world. On the other hand, concerns about digital footprints, bullying, privacy, safety and risk have led school systems to respond with prohibitions that attempt to govern students’ online exchanges (Selwyn, 2010). Given the emerging importance of digital footprints, expert insight can be utilised to provide guidance to teachers around this vexed issue. The ‘Best Footprint Forward’ project involved a survey of digital experts and career advisers to get their perspectives on digital footprint education in the Australian school context. This article reports on the following research questions: 1. what do experts know about digital footprint management ; and 2. what are their suggestions for education? Despite the increasing social and professional significance of digital footprints, expert perspectives on education for digital footprint management are not well known. We move now to detail the literature, reviewing what is known about children and adolescent internet usage, the professional implications of digital footprints, and digital footprints and the Australian curriculum. After providing an overview of the findings of the survey of experts, we conclude by describing the implications of this for schools, and for teachers’ practice.