Children are spending more time on Tik-Tok, Instagram and You Tube that in the company of their parents, In school we have two distant planets that hardly ever meet: the students use Tik-Tok and Instagram while their teachers use online newspapers and Facebook.
No one is guiding children how to use social media better: it has a lot of good and interesting content but also harmful and dangerous. Children are being left alone to navigate this social media as they are not allowed to use it in class and do not discuss it with their parents while at home.
An interesting seminar ‘Promoting digital literacy and creativity in the classroom’ held last month at the headquarters of the Malta Union of Teachers raised and tackled these issues that are not addressed adequately locally. Finnish and EU education expert Dr Kari Kivinen who promotes creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and responsible digital engagement among young Europeans led this stimulating seminar. He was brought to Malta on the initiative of the Malta’s Ambassador to Finland and Estonia, Dr Kenneth Vella who is himself an educator and is the head of the Mater Boni Consilii St Joseph School at Paola. That morning Dr Kivinen had visited that school and held a workshop with both teachers and students and their use of different social media putting the two generations in parallel universes.
Kari Kivinen has been involved in compiling the European Commission ‘Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training’. In her foreword, Commissioner Mariya Gabriel, urged schools across Europe to engage actively with social media: “With the guidance and support of educators and teachers, we collectively contribute to helping our young people to be able to think critically, make informed choices online and stay safe whilst continuously building their resilience. Teachers and educators play a vital role in shaping the digital skills and competences of young people.”
To be able to do all this, schools must not shut out social media to protect themselves from their harm. Schools that insulate themselves from the real world make themselves irrelevant. Our schools must move forward with the world. We must not erect bastions around them and isolate them from the real world. Schools must engage with the modern world of social media and artificial intelligence, not to fight them or to embrace them uncritically, but assimilate whatever may be valid in them and use them purposefully. We have no time to lose. The pace of change in education is much slower than the rate of change in the real world. With digital technology, this gap is widening fast making our education systems at every level obsolete faster if they do not adapt and adjust to these new constantly changing realities.
Our national education policy should allow and encourage the use of digital devices in teaching and learning. Dr Kivinen recommends: “Digital competences should be integrated in the curricula, teachers should be trained properly, and they should be supported and encouraged to deal with the challenges of social media environments during their lessons. This needs the common action of the whole school community starting from school management and without forgetting the role of parents.”
Getting off the hamster wheel
Promoting digital literacy must not be confined to yet another subject or simply incorporating it in media literacy. Digital literacy requires an integrated gradual and thoughtful rebooting of the entire education system: curriculum, syllabi, learning outcomes, pedagogy and assessment. Formal education in schools must be made fit for purpose in the 21st century where layer upon layer of content in many of the subjects must be redesigned realistically and sensibly so that teachers can get off the educational hamster wheel. Teachers must not continue to be made to rush through their vast syllabi and not have enough time for education: to take questions from students and discuss and explore their topics in relation to the world outside the classroom.
As the European Commission Guidelines say: “This digital world potentially allows students the opportunity to access a great deal of information, hear multiple opinions on a topic and to communicate across geographical, linguistic, cultural, and religious barriers. Yet they mostly lack the competences and the wisdom to take full advantage of what is being offered and to identify potential threats.”
With so many children from so many different countries in our schools, most of our state schools in our towns and villages have become international schools. They need to adjust to this complex reality. Digital technology, used properly, can help schools navigate these new uncharted waters. Schools must not be besieged fortresses – fortresses of fear – alienated from a hostile world and threatened by its digital technology from Google to ChatGPT that is changing the world of learning irrevocably.
Schools that refuse to engage openly and critically with digital technology are refusing to join the 21st century and increasingly become archaic and boring institutions killing the lively curiosity and creativity of students, Digital technology is changing the world and will continue to change the world. Children must not be left to their own devices in using digital technology.
Schools must provide the stimulating space where students develop their critical and creative thinking where they learn not only to know, but also to do, to be and to live with others. Students need to develop their critical thinking to be able to filter the content they find on social media. They need to learn how to check facts and to tell facts from opinions and to scrutinise the sources of the information they access and what facts are included and left out. They must be able to detect misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
If they continue to build bastions against digital technology and social media, schools will continue to isolate themselves from the real world. Instead of educating for today and tomorrow they would be educating for yesterday and for the last century and our country will fall behind.
