Blog: Digital competences in times of Corona

by TeDiCom - Teaching Digital Competences in Adult Education

When we started our partnership in the second half of the year 2019, we got together to discuss our capabilities to make our learners (and, last but not least, ourselves) more resilient against the disastrous effect of fake news campaigns in digital media. Each of us had lots of examples from their own daily practice, how and to what extent our learners were targeted by such campaigns. Little did we expect that less than half a year later, the number of fake news in digital media has exploded due to the corona pandemic.

Much has been said about the difference between the Spanish flu and corona, but there's one critical difference that is relevant for our project: back in 1918, there were no social media. As a matter of fact, the Spanish flu got its name from the one country that didn't ban information on the pandemic at the time. Our situation nowadays is completely different. Although official information from many countries may have been tampered with, the bigger impact seems to come from the overflow of false information and conspiracy theories that inundate the web.

We will jointly try to discover, what we as adult educators can do to help our societies through these difficult times. We believe, that critical thinking is a key competence not only in times of corona, but at all times in human history. Our goal as educators is not only to pass on knowledge and information to our audience, but (even more importantly) to help them to evaluate information and to make up their own minds as responsible citizens of European society. In this project, we will try to find out on a very practical level, just what we can do and how we had best do it. We will start our blog with some insight into how we, as institutions from the field of adult education, have been affected in our everyday work by corona. We will continue with insides into the topic of critical thinking and their relationship to digital media. Stay tuned and don't hesitate to contribute your ideas and suggestions!