Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.

For more information, download the Introduction to Our Space, FAQ, and Road Map. All curricular units and lessons are free. You can also download the full casebook.

Our Space was co-developed by The Good Play Project and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking and conduct among young people when exercising new media skills.

For more background about the collaboration that resulted in this casebook, see “How We Got Here,” by Howard Gardner and Henry Jenkins.

If you are using this toolkit, we’d like to hear about it! Please contact us (or email daniel_mucinskas@harvard.edu) if you have any feedback, ideas, concerns, or questions about the Our Space or any of our other projects, resources, and materials.