Digital citizenship education is a societal priority which has been recognised by the Council of Europe. A project on this topic has just started at the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML): "Digital citizenship through language education - e-lang citizen". This project is a follow-up to the e-lang project on digital literacy for the teaching and learning of languages. Through the project a didactic framework will be developed as well as pedagogical resources for teachers. The aim is to enable language teachers to help their learners to

• evaluate critically and autonomously the information published on the Internet;>
• understand how the participatory web works, how information is generated and disseminated;
• become critical, creative and responsible agents on the participatory Web;
• become citizens of an inclusive (multilingual and multicultural) society.

On January 20th and 21th, the project team held its first meeting. The four ECML experts (C. Ollivier, coordinator, C. Jeanneau, T. Natri and U. Szigeti) met with the two Canadian associate partners (C. Caws and M.-J. Hamel). During this meeting, the objectives of the project were specified and the work on an operational definition of digital citizenship was launched. This definition will highlight the language dimensions of digital citizenship. It will provide the basis for the development of pedagogical resources for teachers.

Feel free to follow us on the project website www.ecml.at/elang2 - which is available in English and French - and on Twitter (#ECML_elang).

 

Authors: Christian Ollivier and the e-lang citizen Project

*****

"Digital Citizenship Through Language Education - e-lang citizen" is one of the 9 new projects of the ECML's programme "Inspiring innovation in language education: changing contexts, evolving competences" (2020-2023).