I’ve discovered the title is a tongue twister, especially if I try to say it in Croatian. And I had to say it quite a few times over the last few days because I delivered a workshop on the topic at the CARNET Users’ Conference a few days ago. This is an annual edtech conference organized by my institution and it’s very well attended by Croatian standards, with over 1100 delegates this year.
I guess I had an idea of what digital citizenship entailed prior to becoming a little more involved in the topic earlier this year and if pressed, I suspect I would have defined a digital citizen as… someone who is equipped to function in a digital society? I suppose that kind of rules out my dad, who lives in complete denial as far as the internet is concerned (except for the weather app that he uses religiously). 🙂
In April I attended a training session on DCE on behalf of my institution and tweeted about it a tiny bit – apart from generally not being very good at tweeting live from events and focusing on what people around me are saying at the same time, I wasn’t sure what the extent of our involvement in DCE promotion in Croatia was going to be. The training session was organized by the Council of Europe and was aimed at familiarizing the participants with the DCE project as well as some of the materials which had been produced therein. One of these is the Digital Citizenship Education Handbook, which you can see in the tweet.
My very recent workshop was a general one, aiming to introduce the 10 domains of digital citizenship as identified by the DCE expert group and briefly present the project, with a focus on the project outputs that the workshop participants can use in their teaching.
In preparing the workshop I used another project output: the trainers’ pack, which had been in its final prep stage in April and is, I think, close to publication now. The materials in the trainers’ pack have been designed specifically for the purpose of running workshops to familiarize teachers and other potential participants (whole schools, parents, students) with the concept of DCE. The workshop was held in Croatian.
Because this was a workshop, a significant amount of participant input was envisaged, which is why there are relatively few slides (which also often contain references to offline materials). What you can see at a glance are the 10 DCE domains and links to the project website and the handbook (these last two are available only in English).
On a personal note, this was the first (I think) workshop I ran entirely on my own in Croatian, so I was pretty pleased with how it went. Perhaps not surprisingly, if you present or run workshops which are ELT-related, this is usually done in English. As this was an edtech conference, there may have been expectations on the part of some of the participants that there would be greater emphasis on the digital in the title, but participant contributions were great and very useful.
I think I’ll stop here and possibly revisit this topic somewhere down the line if I do some more presenting on it or otherwise promote it in my context. Thanks to Jonathan for prompting me to write this up as I thought the slides might benefit from a bit of context (in English).
After Octopus 