1.

The European Recommendation 18 December 20061 states the frame of the eight citizenship
competencies that schools and longlife education have to develop. In this frame is included what the
frame itself defines “digital competence”. This is an interesting turning point for the social
reception of Media Literacy: what was previously thought only as one of the many “educations” our
school systems should think to, now becomes one of the main competencies we have to provide for
the future citizens we are educating. The switch is from an idea of Media Literacy as a choice to a
new idea of Media Literacy as a core part of a wider Citizenship Education (Rivoltella, 2008).
This is the reason why the European Reccomendation 20 August 20092 can say that “Media
Literacy is a matter of inclusion and citizenship in today's information osciety. (…) Media literacy
is today regarded as one of the key prerequisites for ana ctive and full citizenship in order to prevent
and diminish risks of exclusion from community life”.

2. What does it means to develop a digital competence? Almost three issues:

- skills: to be able to use IST (Information Society Technologies) in job-oriented and everyday
activities; communicate; produce, find, store, share and evaluate informations;
- critical thinking: to be aware of risks and opportunities of technologies; to be able to read and
analyse messages;
- creative acting: to be able to produce contents, to express itself in these new languages, to be able
to use these tools in an innovation perspective.

3. The Recommendation talks about Information Society Technologies (IST). The normal trend is to
think about these in terms of: computer, Internet and its applications (nowadays I suppose mostly
2.0 applications such as Facebook, blogs, wikies and all the other Social Network tools). But we
don't forgive that, in the Information Society, we have:
- some other technologies really belonging to youngsters' and adults' everyday life, like mobile
phones, MP3 players and videogame consoles;
- some other media, probably not so “new” but “re-newed” by the digital convergence and finally
re-mediated (Bolter & Grusin, 2000): television, cinema (now available on a lot of different
screens), radio, newspapers.
So, when we talk about digital competence, we have to mean this competence in a wide sense.
We have to include in this also those media competencies that Media Literacy traditionally ought to
be powered about the so called “old media”. In the mesure these media became “new”, making part
of the new digital media arena, it should be quite strange do not consider them in the development
of the tomorrow citizens' education.

4. The actual media arena is really changed if we compare it with the previous one. This change is
well described by Roger Silverstone (2007). The media arena (he names “Mediapolis”) is:
- a space of appearence, i.e. a space where the world could appear and an appearence belonging to
the structure of the world itself;
- not only the extension of the “phisic” social and political arena (as Anna Harendt said), but part of
this arena itself;
- a space where we can experiment the convergence of discourse and action. Better: in this space
every discourse is an action. As I already said in one of my books (Rivoltella, 2003), the media
arena is a pragmatic arena where we really understand what John Langshaw Austin meant when he
talked about our possibility of “doing things with words”.

5. The media arena is at the same time a space of experience for youngsters, an effective
marketplace for industries and a “classroom” for educators.

6. Youngsters' experience in the media arena is characterized by different activities. They use the
1
In Internet, URL: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:0010:0018:en:PDF.
2
In Internet, URL: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:227:0009:0012:EN:PDF.
media in their free-time (mainly videogames and music), they foster their social relations thanks to
them (this is the case of instant messaging and mobile phones), they produce messages publishing
them in the public space (when they take a photo or make a video and then they publish them in
You-tube, in Flickr or in another web space). All these activities aid to describe a consumption
profile of the youngsters quite different from those we already knew before. And there are two main
aspects that are making new this profile: the first one is that youngsters nowadays are really
“dressing the media”, so that their presence is persistent and meaningful representing the natural
space for a lot of activities; on the other side, youngsters are nowadays more active, they are less
receivers and more authors, being able to produce and publish messages. Here we have a substantial
change. Youngsters are no more people we have to protect from bad messages or from the risks
they could find interacting with the media; on the contrary they are somebody we have to make
responsible for his/her own acts. The change is from protection to responsibility. It's a change
forcing us to reconsider our representation of Childhood and Adolescence as an Innocence Age: to
educate their responsibility means to consider them citizens and prepare them to be conscious of
this fact.

7. The media arena is at the the present time both a chance and a challenge for Media Industries. It's
a chance, because the media arena is wide, youngsters are populating it and youngsters are a driver
for the market. The problems here – from the education point of view - are concerning the quality of
the contents, the quantity of the access, the marketing actions aiming to reach adults using
youngsters as a target. Probably we need a new alliance between industries and education. Media
Literacy could represent for them a good opportunity for a self-regulation able to balance educative
attention and market-orientation. Several are the proposals in this way: the presence of media
educators in the corporations, the presence of media professionals in the schools, the research of
new quality formats and services for youngsters.

8. We said that media arena is a class-room for educators. And it is true. The problem is that
educators – both in family and in school – seem to be not able to stay in this class-room in a
meaningful way. Parents are really far from sons' ways of consumption: they don't know what
youngsters do with the media, they think that computer and Internet are important for their future
but they are very concerned with the risks of these technologies. So, normally they address to the
schools the responsibility in educating children about the media: in this way they try to remove the
problem, convincing themselves that it belongs to others. The situation in schools is not so better. In
this case we have a problem with the curricula – whose preoccupation for technologies and skills is
too big, and on the contrary the preoccupation for media culture is too small – and with the teachers.
Their training remains a big question: they normally don't have competencies and tend to resolve
the matter on the side of technological skills. On the contrary, the problem with media and
technologies is a problem of methods and techniques: we don't have to learn to use media, but to
transform our teaching behaviours thanks to the media.

9. In all these cases one of the main problems is how to evaluate processes and outcomes.
Evaluation is almost about contents. In the old media arena this problem was related practically to
the issue of quality: the civil society, the associations of parents and of the media, normally invoked
in that situation standards and controls for granting this quality. In actual media arena the problem is
really more difficult: social media tend to be considered good even if their quality is bad. So: what
is a quality content? Is it good if it informs us about a fact, but its images and sounds are bad? What
are the criteria according to which we can evaluate this? On the other side, we've also a big problem
in the case of assessment? What does it mean to assess students abou their media competencies? It
is not so easy. We cannot use the traditional assessment tools: in fact they normally mesure the
presence of informations, and not the quality of a performance. So, we have here to change our way
of assessment adopting methods and techniques of authentic assessment, i.e. ethnografic
observation, embedded tasks, portfolios, and so on.