European Digital Citizenship

Rationale:

Our world is changing, and we need to adapt to new realities of knowledge, society, and education. Technology has fundamentally changed our idea of community and the ways in which we interact with each other, so that building individual networks for learning and support is more important than ever before.

The Internet has broken down many barriers of space and time, allowing us to rethink the way that we learn, work and connect; we now operate within more fluid and complex networks of people from around the globe. The Internet also provides cheaper, freer access to an enormous amount of information and educational content. Learning can be done anywhere, at anytime, and by anyone.

Supporting young people to participate safely, effectively, critically and responsibly in a world filled with social media and digital technologies is a priority for all. The project aims to enhance the notion of digital citizenship has evolved to encompass a range of competences, attributes and behaviours that harness the benefits and opportunities the online world affords while building resilience to potential harms.

This means that we need to rethink our idea of any form of learning - if massive amounts of content are available to anyone, we need to ensure that young people are equipped with the skills to safely “We need to ensure that young people are equipped with the skills to safely and smartly sift through this abundance of information and to navigate online spaces in ways that contribute to their learning.”

As the availability of computers and the internet is becoming widespread in developed countries (OECD 2017), the lack of digital skills, as opposed to digital access, is becoming the key factor underlying the existing wide inequalities in how and why people use ICT tools (UNESCO 2017). In addition disparities in digital literacy may result in educational inequalities in the labor market. Evidence indicates substantial differences in digital literacy among different demographic and socio-economic groups with Romania (70%), Greece (67%), Cyprus (57%), Poland - Italy (54%), Lithuania (52%) and Slovenia (50%).

Objectives/Goals:

In the above context the project pioneers to design, pilot test, implement, monitor and evaluate:
(a) a TOOL KIT for developing, implementing and monitoring strategies for creating DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP CLUBS targeted on young peoples’ needs aiming to promote the acquisition of digital competences, but also to develop digital citizenship awareness and medial literacy.
(b) a MULTI-PACK to support youth workers to implement the strategy which will include a targeted YOUTH WORKERS’ TRAINING COURSE to meet the needs of the project, several teaching resources, collection of tools, material etc. for introducing digital literacy, media literacy and digital citizenships among youth organisations accompanied with monitoring and assessment metrics.
(c) A dynamic and interactive PORTAL/PLATFORM which will serve different purposes such as communication platform among participants through the creation of young peoples’, youth organisations’ and youth workers’ profiles to disseminate examples of their work, as a data bank for resources, materials and good practices and as management tool for the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the pilot-testing phase.