Digital Natives – Vít's participant opinion /SK

Digital Natives - participant Vít's opinion /SK

The Digital Natives project took place from October 12th to 19th. As the name suggests, the topic of digital technologies was its main component. This course effectively combined specific expert knowledge with an informal method of education.

On the first day, we focused on getting to know each other and shared our expectations, our overall perspective, and then the issue of Youth-pass. The organizer presented us with interesting statistics from the field of digitalization in society. We focused on the differences in the widespread platforms of Messenger, WhatsApp, and other tools. We also agreed that this era precedes the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is also associated with the concept of Technium, which involves the connection of culture with technology and globalization. This requires a completely different approach and necessary future innovation. After all, this was one of the main goals of this project – to be able to pass on the acquired subconscious knowledge to other people around us, especially young people.

It is certain that social media are an integral part of our lives and there is no turning back. This brings new challenges that we will face, such as cybersecurity and the disruption of social ties. However, many positives also arise, and in the next section, we focused precisely on these aspects. We also tried to define what digital technologies specifically mean in youth work. Although it seems obvious, it is not that simple. In this context, in the section on security, we discussed the issue of data retention for all our online activities. Large media players, therefore, know everything about us, but there are tools to prevent the retention of this data. This is also related to the concept of the dark web and anonymization.

The next day, we presented the results of questionnaires regarding media. We came to interesting findings, for example, some countries prefer Messenger, while others prefer WhatsApp. This also indicates different preferences for using mobile or desktop devices, mobile internet, communication style in a given country, and corporate culture. This can therefore be social research, but conducted from the opposite side, i.e., from technology to people, which is not very common.

Furthermore, we discussed Storytelling and the principles of filmmaking. We delved into useful details from composition to technical parameters. Then we visited Zadar and tried out working with a camera in practice during short exercises. Afterwards, we were divided into teams to create a concept for a short film, which was then further developed. Finally, we chose a film combining elements of communication through social media and at the same time promoting Erasmus + not only as an academic platform, but also as an opportunity to participate in non-formal education projects.

This training course was indeed very intensive; we improved our media literacy, learned new types and tools for working with social media, and gained practical experience in presenting through dynamic content. I consider working with video to be the highest added value.