Teaching Digital Competences Erasmus Project

Project Title

Teaching Digital Competences

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

TeDiCom stands for Teaching Digital Competences. It is a project that supports educators in adult education to understand and teach digital competences, in particular for activists in social initiatives.
Context:
The need for an increased level of Digital Competences amongst European citizens has become increasingly relevant for European societies. Fake news campaigns, hate speech and automated bot campaigns threaten the democratic decision-making process. Democratic societies have shown themselves as particularly vulnerable to this new style of influencing. Even at the time of writing this text, activities to destabilise the European Union in the preparation of the European Parliament election, take place and threaten to increase the influence of anti-democratic or populist powers.
Objectives:
TeDiCom strives to increase the resilience of democratic European societies to resist this new threat. It does so by empowering adult activists to have a better understanding of digital media and their risks and opportunities.
Methodology:
Digital literacy has traditionally been understood as the individual’s competence to express itself in a digital environment. In recent years, together with the rise of social media, it has become increasingly important to add new competences in order to react to new tendencies in the dissemination of information. At the Davos economic Forum in 2016, the term digital intelligence (DQ) was coined to describe the wide range of competences, which cover social, emotional and cognitive abilities. In a joint communication, the European commission has developed an action plan in December 2018 to fight disinformation. The fourth pillar of this plan calls for raising awareness and an improvement of societal resilience. This pillar will be strengthened by TeDiCom.
Adult education is particularly well placed, when it comes to the dissemination of these competences. The building of societal resilience in non-formal educational settings finds ways to reach those adult learners, who do not themselves perceive the demand for DQ. Many adults in our times grew up without the use of social media, and without having learned about the use of social media in the formal education environment.
Participants:
In our consortium, we have a group of professionals in adult education dealing with adults, who have a message that they want to spread, and that are active users of social media as sending and receiving entities. Each of us has found his or her own ways to tackle the task of digital competences in his or her organisation. With the help of our German research partner we will transform our shared experience into a working concept. At the same time, we will learn about the underlying mechanics and functioning of information in the digital age, in particular regarding the use of social media.
Impact:
TeDiCom will help the educators to conceptualise their existing training activities, evaluate and focus their impact to make them more relevant for the learners, more transferable for other educators and more useful for society .
Activities:
During several transnational meetings, educators from the participating organisations will come together to exchange good practice examples from their own organisations and from other organisations within the network. Each partner will send up to two professionals, so that we will have a good dozen of experienced educators from different sectors of adult education. Each of the meetings will be prepared by the hosting organisation, that will show us, how they have dealt with the topic before, what they have achieved and what challenges they have faced. Over the project runtime, we will have learned about a large number of different approaches. Together with the conceptual framework, we will be able to evaluate, focus and potentially the existing practices. This information will be collected and feeds into a handbook of best practices, which can be used by other professionals.
The project culminates in a teacher training activity, to which further professionals from adult education will be invited. Together with this wider group of professionals, we will test and evaluate the practical applicability and relevance of our training concept. This activity serves both to disseminate our newly gained competences and to improve our teacher training methodology.
Long-term perspective:
It is planned to continue our project after the end of TeDiCom with a new strategic partnership, that will develop widely usable training courses for professionals in adult education, based on our results. Already at the end of TeDiCom, though, the handbook will be published on the website of the participating organisations and made available to the interested audience. A dedicated project website will help to disseminate the innovative teacher training

Project Website

http://kultur-life.de/projekte/tedicom/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 41763,58 Eur

Project Coordinator

KulturLife gGmbH & Country: DE

Project Partners

• DRUSTVO ZA RAZVIJANJE PROSTOVOLJNEGA DELA NOVO MESTO
• Kansan Sivistystyön Liitto KSL ry
• Bildungswerkstatt Nachhaltigkeit e.V.
• Vilniaus “Zidinio” suaugusiuju gimnazija
• Kvarnby folkhögskola