Enhancing Digital Citizenship – Students and Teachers Become Aware of Manipulation and Indoctrination in Social Networks Erasmus Project

Project Title

Enhancing Digital Citizenship – Students and Teachers Become Aware of Manipulation and Indoctrination in Social Networks

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The spread of manipulated news, misinformation and hate on the Internet poses new challenges for European democracies. DETECT aims to help students and teachers to recognize fake news, to reflect on its background and to take active action against it.

Background:
Whether so-called ‘trolls’ influenced the US election campaign is unclear. What is undisputed is that populist theses are very popular in the ‘real world’ and in social media. Extreme and populist parties are celebrating election successes in all European countries: They blame “others” or “corrupt elites” for serious social problems. Using manipulative technologies and disinformation campaigns, radical groups and organizations try to reinforce these narratives in social media.

The EC, EACEA and Eurydice define goals for member states to counter extremism and populism: “Enhancing critical thinking and media literacy, particularly the use of the internet and social media, so as to develop resistance to all forms of discrimination and indoctrination” (EC/EACEA/Eurydice, 2016. Promoting Citizenship […] p.3 .).
The targeted strengthening of democratic active citizenship, e.g. in the area of social networks, is formulated as an urgent educational-practical countermeasure, because young people obtain their information about politics and society mainly through forums such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Right-wing populist and radical right-wing organizations are hidden behind many seemingly serious information offerings. According to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute, misinformation and junk news account for “twenty percent of all political news and information on Twitter.”

Topics:
– The conditions under which information is created and passed on (social, political, economic, technical).
– An improved, critical judgment competence of students (e.g. by recognizing so-called ‘computational propaganda’)
– Strengthening of digital active citizenship (e.g. learning how to act in case of extremist and anti-human ‘news’ or posts).

The DETECT project combines media and democracy competencies with the didactic concept of inquiry-based learning. The method of research-based learning is suitable when students encounter new content that they can explore mainly independently from the perspective of certain “research questions”. In doing so, they ask questions, form hypotheses, find examples, link content with each other – and finally present their results and findings for discussion in a plenary session.
The KMK (2012, 7) emphasizes that media-competent teachers are the key to media-competent students. The project is therefore aimed at teachers who learn practical strategies for teaching “digital literacy”.
In a research-based teaching/learning arrangement, teachers at secondary schools learn about instruments for influencing opinion and will formation: e.g. algorithms, social bots, dark posts, strategies of professional “influencers”, etc. The teachers then lead research workshops. Then, these teachers lead research workshops for high school students.
The results (IOs), which are developed and tested by the consortium, are transferable to other contexts:
– Vocational education
– Higher education (lecturers lead labs with students)
– adult education
– Youth

Concrete results:
– Compendium with strategies and instruments of influence in social networks: “Of trolls and dark posts”.
– Methodical and didactical material to conduct a DETECT-studio with students of secondary level II
– Problem-oriented hands-on impulses as a basis for the students’ research – related to the contexts in all 4 partner countries
– 2 online tutorials and a blended learning course for teachers

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 211839 Eur

Project Coordinator

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITAET HANNOVER & Country: DE

Project Partners

• GONG
• CENTER FOR EDUCATION AND QUALIFICATION ON PEDAGOGICAL SPECIALISTS
• NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY
• GIMNAZIJA PULA
• Demokratiezentrum Wien