Innovation in digital communications is transforming traditional social configurations and relations. Social media enables users to share information with multiple others quickly and easily. This can reinvigorate civil society via new forms of digital participation through networked debate, deliberation and information sharing and it is often claimed that social media has the potential to transform the learning experience both inside and out of the classroom. While this can have positive impacts, it can also lead to ‘digital wildfires’ (Webb et al., 2015) in which misleading or provocative content (e.g. in the form of rumour or hate speech) spreads rapidly with very negative impact.  In media there are sufficiently regular reports of young people’s misuse of social media which results in harm to themselves and others.  Therefore educating users on the risks of social media and how to act as responsible digital citizens is essential.

While there are growing concerns around young people’s social media usage, from cyberbullying to sexting, there is also a new digital divide between teachers and students in terms of their use and exposure to different forms of social media and the technologies they use to access them.  Schools are currently caught between developing students' knowledge and understanding of responsible usage of technology, whilst governing its use.  The Co-producing Understanding of Digital Responsibility project aimed to develop teachers’ and students’ understanding of responsible social media usage and digital citizenship through the co-production of innovative teaching and learning materials, reducing the divide and creating a growing knowledge community.  Informed by communal constructivist pedagogy (Girvan & Savage, 2010), in which learners create knowledge artefacts with and for others, learners aged 12-14 participated in four lessons during which they chose a digital responsibility topic to research and created a digital artefact to demonstrate their understanding, which was shared with others.  Feedback from others, reflection and evaluation were used to inform the development of these artefacts which would become resources for other learners.

Girvan, C. & Savage, T. (2010). Identifying an appropriate pedagogy for virtual worlds: A Communal Constructivism case study. Computers & Education 55(1) 342-349. Housley, W, Procter, R. Edwards, A. Burnap, P. Williams, M. Sloan, L. Rana, O. Morgan, J. Voss, A. and Greenhill, A. (2014). ‘Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response.’ Big Data & Society 1 (2) Webb, H., Jirotka, M., Stahl, B.C., Housley, W., Edwards, A., Williams, M., Procter, R., Rana, O. and Burnap, P., (2015). 'Digital Wildfires': a challenge to the governance of social media? In Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (p. 64). ACM.