Project Meeting: Fostering Digital Citizenship Education in Asia-Pacific
When, local time: 21-22 November 2018
Where: Landmark Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand
Type of Event: Project Meeting
Contact: ict.bgk@unesco.org
We continue to witness the many ways that the exponential growth of ICT has fundamentally changed the way society operates. Globally, 2018 has seen mounting concerns by countries and their citizens about online data privacy, rapid automation, and various ICT-facilitated (political, ethnic and racial) conflicts, coupled with a denser web of Internet of Things that affects how we live, work, play and learn.
Considering that ICT has become a dominant channel to participate in and contribute to the highly connected knowledge society, the Education 2030 Agenda emphasized the acquisition of relevant ICT and digital literacy skills as part of the relevant key competencies needed for employment, decent job attainment, and entrepreneurship. The digital skills in this regard should include competencies that go beyond basic ICT literacy to enable learners to be digital citizens. Such competencies should include knowledge, skills and attitude that allow learners to effectively manage and be resilient to an array of social and ethical challenges while being aware of one’s rights and the wealth of opportunities in the digital world.
In response to the need for the education sector to provide an enabling and conducive environment in policy and practice that fosters digital citizenship among children, UNESCO Bangkok with the continued support from the Korean Funds-in-Trust launched the “Enhancing National Capacity to Foster Digital Citizenship Education in Asia-Pacific” Project with the Project Meeting in 2017 and will continue to 2021
Progress to Date
Dubbed as "Digital Kids Asia Pacific", the first project component intends to create a baseline understanding of children’s actual use of ICT in education settings. Building on the refined version of the Digital Citizenship Competency Framework developed in July 2017, a research instrument and related documents were developed by the principal investigators from Institute of School Violence Prevention based in Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea, in May 2018. The UNESCO Bangkok project team has been coordinating with the pilot countries through the relevant UNESCO Field Offices and National Commissions for UNESCO. As of October 2018, all four pilot countries have completed data collection.
The second project component, "Competency-Based Teacher Training Reform to Facilitate ICT-Pedagogy Integration", emphasizes the critical role that teachers play in fostering digital citizenship competencies. Activities under this project component are proceeding according to each of the six countries’ timetables and priority areas within the project framework. Project Orientation Meetings were held to clarify the project scope, activities, deliverables, and timelines with the country Task Forces. The UNESCO Bangkok project team has been collaborating with the country teams in organizing and conducting the national workshops. In addition, the “Guideline for Supporting Competency-Based Teacher Training Reforms to Facilitate ICT-Pedagogy Integration” was enhanced and made available online in May 2018.
Project Meeting
One year after the launch of the Project, the Project Meeting will bring together key stakeholders to take stock of the progress to-date and to reflect on how to improve project implementation from the perspective of government counterparts, advisory committees, project evaluator, project management team and UNESCO Field Offices or National Commissions for UNESCO. In view of this, the objectives of the Meeting are two-fold: 1) to evaluate the current KFIT Project with the target countries; and 2) to review and plan for the second year of implementation.
Links:
- Photo gallery
- Concept note & programme
- Session 1: Overall Progress of the “Enhancing National Capacity to Foster Digital Citizenship Education in Asia-Pacific” Project
- Session 2: Digital Kids Asia Pacific Preliminary Findings and Highlights
- Session 3: Capacity Building related to ICT Competency Standards for Teachers Progress Review
- Session 4: Open Discussion: Thinking Ahead
- Session 5: Project Evaluation – What are we doing and where should we go from here?
- Session 7:Reporting Back
Relevant pages: 2017 KFIT Project Meeting; Safe, Effective and Responsible Use of ICT; Competency-Based Teacher Training Reform to Facilitate ICT-Pedagogy Integration
