ISYDE, Italian SYmposium on Digital Education, is the yearly conference organized by the Italian e-Learning Society (SIe-L) that is in line with previous conferences (EMEMITALIA and SIEL) whose organization was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In resuming its conference activities, SIe-L aims to broaden the focus from e-learning and media education to ‘digital education’ in a wider meaning as a matter emerging from the recent years’ experiences.
The Focus of this year’s edition is: “Innovating Teaching & Learning. Inclusion and Wellbeing for the Data Society” (Reggio Emilia, 13-15 September 2023).

Cremit presents researches on video games, digital badges in higher education, digital educational poverty, Media and Audiovisual Education, online hate speech detection.

GAMES AND VIDEO GAMES AS SCENARIOS TO SUPPORT DIGITAL LITERACIES: THE FIRST RESULTS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT YO-MEDIA (YOUNGSTERS’ MEDIA LITERACY IN TIMES OF CRISIS) by Alessandra CARENZIO, Simona FERRARI, Stefano PASTA

In recent years, especially in response to the pandemic, a variety of Media Education and audiovisual literacy courses have multiplied in the attempt to respond to the increased onlife (Floridi 2017) and mediated experience of being in the world. Since cinema’s inception, the images that moved on and behind the screens of the first cinematographers changed completely the way we relate to and represent reality. Audiovisual media have gradually become both a mirror (sometimes distorted) that reflect the attitudes, values, and norms shared by a society and, at the same time, a window towards distant worlds and perspectives. Some scholars have highlighted how cinema has become a “place of memory”, a large collective diary, a space capable of welcoming in the short, medium and long term, the sensitive or minimal oscillations of an economic and social, ideological, cultural and anthropological nature.
Conversely, today the widespread consumption of Tv series seems to fulfill another function: it can be considered, and studied, as a barometer to measure social change, global sociocultural penchants, and the influence of global economic powers in shaping what and who is profitable to represent on screen. Tv series also become the arenas where younger generations debate and negotiate new social imaginaries and identities. In other words, tv series not only reflect the reality we already live in but also shape what we envision for the future. Thus, learning how to “read” moving images empowers us to understand what it means to be in the world at the time of digital hyper-connectivity and how they can shape the society we live in. The task to guide students through the ever-growing complexity of the contemporary mediascape has increasingly fallen onto schools and teachers who often feel unprepared, and often at a disadvantage compared to their “born digital” students, to undertake this mission. Furthermore, in the last decade in Italy, there has been renewed attention from institutions to include cinema, and more generally audiovisual media, within the school curriculum, which has elicited many requests from teachers to be supported in the development of lesson plans that are mindful of the changing sociocultural context where their students are living.
To this end, the contribution “Inside Black Mirror: Media, Society, Education” intends to respond to the need of a new education on and with audiovisual products and the combined need of understanding and live the contemporary mediatized society, offering secondary school teachers of any subject an innovative guideline that combines theoretical reflections and practical activities to develop lessons plans that integrate audiovisual and media literacy education in the classroom, in educational spaces, or in third spaces (Potter and McDougall 2019). Starting from the viewing of a selection of sequences from the tv series Black Mirror the project wishes to achieve three main objectives: (1) gain insight on the workings of the contemporary media context; (2) expose students to the social implications of living in a mediatized world (the relationship with devices, the fine line between media control and trust, cyberstupidity, the cohabitation of public and private); (3) learn basic skills to detect and understand the use of the audiovisual language.
Black Mirror is a science fiction series organized into self-contained episodes (stand-alone episodes) which cross different genres each time, touching in each episode a specific thematic scenario that forwards the relationship between man and technology in a possible future. This TV series lends itself perfectly to meeting the objectives of a “New Media Education” (Rivoltella 2020). The TV series in question, in fact, allows us to critically explore multiple characteristics of the contemporary media
landscape and how its potential future impacts on our lives. The ability of the series to narrate contemporary (and in some cases, future) themes, issues and problems is certainly enhanced by the construction of suitable settings to support reflections in the various communities involved. Therefore, the project is nourished by a collection of lesson plans that can be adopted in different school and educational contexts. The activities have been designed around images and texts from a selection of Black Mirror episodes, providing ready-made scenarios through lesson plans designed to engage with adolescents and younger people. With regard to meeting the demands of the school programs, the topics of the lesson plans intersect themes that are appropriate to fit within the “civic digital citizenship” courses as they can be easily intertwined within a broader work on digital culture, responsibility, and awareness aimed at building an attentive, creative, respectful attitude at all levels. At the same time, they can be used to explore specific themes within several subjects such as, for instance, the technological advancements of A.I. within a science course or the effects of social rating within a sociology or politics course.
Lastly, the result is also an intellectual laboratory within the academic system as it deliberately combines two perspectives, that of Media Studies and that of the Educational Sciences. This experimental combination of perspectives was carried out for two main reasons. Firstly, the theoretical perspective of Media Education unites these two well-defined and recognizable souls in their conceptual debts and methodological dynamics. Different, yet complementary, backgrounds are set into dialogue with one another in an attempt to provide a nuanced and faceted outlook onto the contemporary mediascape. The second reason is ideological positioning. This work wishes to counteract the extreme fragmentation between disciplines and research fields, at least in the Italian academic system. This fragmentation can be particularly counterproductive in Media and Audiovisual Education, as it can negatively impact the service that it wishes to provide to school institutions. Only through cross-pollination of different expertise new knowledge and ideas can be produced.

INSIDE BLACK MIRROR: MEDIA, SOCIETY, EDUCATION: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY WORK FOR THE STUDY OF MEDIA AND AUDIOVISUAL EDUCATION AT SCHOOL by Alessandra CARENZIO, Elisa FARINACCI

In recent years, especially in response to the pandemic, a variety of Media Education and audiovisual literacy courses have multiplied in the attempt to respond to the increased onlife (Floridi 2017) and mediated experience of being in the world. Since cinema’s inception, the images that moved on and behind the screens of the first cinematographers changed completely the way we relate to and represent reality. Audiovisual media have gradually become both a mirror (sometimes distorted) that reflect the attitudes, values, and norms shared by a society and, at the same time, a window towards distant worlds and perspectives. Some scholars have highlighted how cinema has become a “place of memory”, a large collective diary, a space capable of welcoming in the short, medium and long term, the sensitive or minimal oscillations of an economic and social, ideological, cultural and anthropological nature.
Conversely, today the widespread consumption of Tv series seems to fulfill another function: it can be considered, and studied, as a barometer to measure social change, global sociocultural penchants, and the influence of global economic powers in shaping what and who is profitable to represent on screen. Tv series also become the arenas where younger generations debate and negotiate new social imaginaries and identities. In other words, tv series not only reflect the reality we already live in but also shape what we envision for the future. Thus, learning how to “read” moving images empowers us to understand what it means to be in the world at the time of digital hyper-connectivity and how they can shape the society we live in. The task to guide students through the ever-growing complexity of the contemporary mediascape has increasingly fallen onto schools and teachers who often feel unprepared, and often at a disadvantage compared to their “born digital” students, to undertake this mission. Furthermore, in the last decade in Italy, there has been renewed attention from institutions to include cinema, and more generally audiovisual media, within the school curriculum, which has elicited many requests from teachers to be
supported in the development of lesson plans that are mindful of the changing sociocultural context where their students are living.
To this end, the contribution “Inside Black Mirror: Media, Society, Education” intends to respond to the need of a new education on and with audiovisual products and the combined need of understanding and live the contemporary mediatized society, offering secondary school teachers of any subject an innovative guideline that combines theoretical reflections and practical activities to develop lessons plans that integrate audiovisual and media literacy education in the classroom, in educational spaces, or in third spaces (Potter and McDougall 2019). Starting from the viewing of a selection of sequences from the tv series Black Mirror the project wishes to achieve three main objectives: (1) gain insight on the workings of the contemporary media context; (2) expose students to the social implications of living in a mediatized world (the relationship with devices, the fine line between media control and trust, cyberstupidity, the cohabitation of public and private); (3) learn basic skills to detect and understand the use of the audiovisual language.
Black Mirror is a science fiction series organized into self-contained episodes (stand-alone episodes) which cross different genres each time, touching in each episode a specific thematic scenario that forwards the relationship between man and technology in a possible future. This TV series lends itself perfectly to meeting the objectives of a “New Media Education” (Rivoltella 2020). The TV series in question, in fact, allows us to critically explore multiple characteristics of the contemporary media
landscape and how its potential future impacts on our lives. The ability of the series to narrate contemporary (and in some cases, future) themes, issues and problems is certainly enhanced by the construction of suitable settings to support reflections in the various communities involved. Therefore, the project is nourished by a collection of lesson plans that can be adopted in different school and educational contexts. The activities have been designed around images and texts from a selection of Black Mirror
episodes, providing ready-made scenarios through lesson plans designed to engage with adolescents and younger people. With regard to meeting the demands of the school programs, the topics of the lesson plans intersect themes that are appropriate to fit within the “civic digital citizenship” courses as they can be easily intertwined within a broader work on digital culture, responsibility, and awareness aimed at building an attentive, creative, respectful attitude at all levels. At the same time, they can be used to explore specific themes within several subjects such as, for instance, the technological advancements of A.I. within a science course or the effects of social rating within a sociology or politics course.
Lastly, the result is also an intellectual laboratory within the academic system as it deliberately combines two perspectives, that of Media Studies and that of the Educational Sciences. This experimental combination of perspectives was carried out for two main reasons. Firstly, the theoretical perspective of Media Education unites these two well-defined and recognizable souls in their conceptual debts and methodological dynamics. Different, yet complementary, backgrounds are set into dialogue with one another in an attempt to provide a nuanced and faceted outlook onto the contemporary mediascape. The second reason is ideological positioning. This work wishes to counteract the extreme fragmentation between disciplines and research fields, at least in the Italian academic system. This fragmentation can be particularly counterproductive in Media and Audiovisual Education, as it can negatively impact the service that it wishes to provide to school institutions. Only through cross-pollination of different expertise new knowledge and ideas can be produced.

THE USE OF DIGITAL BADGES IN HIGHER EDUCATION. A CASE STUDY OF THE IMPACT ON COLLEGE STUDENTS by Federica PELIZZARI

The use of digital badges in education has become increasingly popular in recent years, and much scientific literature has focused on this topic.
Digital badges are digital tools used in education to recognise and certify students’ competences and learning outcomes. These are similar to traditional physical badges or medals that are awarded to mark a skill or achievement but can be shared through social media platforms or can be incorporated into a digital curriculum. One of their main features is that they can be displayed online, allowing students to share them easily with potential employers, higher education institutions or other interested bodies.
Badges are often supported by a detailed description of the skills acquired and the criteria used to assign them, making it easier to understand their meaning and value (Frederiksen, 2013). Researchers examined the benefits and challenges of implementing digital badges, including the effects on student motivation, the impact on learning and assessment, and the best practices for badge design and implementation.
One of their main features is the ability to recognise and value the skills acquired by students outside the traditional school environment (Abramovich, 2016). For example, a badge could be awarded for the ability to solve complex problems and engage in effective collaboration or for creativity. In this way, students can demonstrate their specific skills to others, including potential employers or higher education institutions (Carey & Stefaniak, 2018). Furthermore, scientific literature has highlighted the role of digital badges in student motivation. Badges can provide immediate and tangible feedback on student performance, thereby encouraging engagement and active participation (Hurst, 2015) and can be designed to be ‘open’ or ‘stackable’, allowing students to earn successive badges to build an increasingly advanced skill set. This progression system ca increase students’ motivation to pursue long-term learning goals (Newby & Cheng, 2020).
However, the implementation of digital badgesin education also raises crucial challenges. It is important that badges are based on clear and reliable criteria to ensure the integrity of the assessment process, and their design must be carefully evaluated to ensure that they are valid and recognised by stakeholders, such as employers or academic institutions (Ostashewski & Reid, 2015).
Literature suggests some good practices for the design and implementation of digital badges. These include involving students in the badge designing process, collaboration between faculty and industry experts to define evaluation criteria, using reliable technologies for badge management and validation, and creating opportunities for badge users to highlight and share their achievements (Shields & Chugh, 2017).
In Higher Education, digital badges are a means to recognise and validate students’ skills and achievements beyond the traditional grade-based assessment system (Besser & Newby, 2019). For example, they can be awarded to students to demonstrate completion of specific courses, modules or projects or can be acquired through various activities, such as attending workshops, completing projects, collaborating with other students or achieving specific levels of competence in a given field of study.
In this scenario, a case study was conducted within the one-year course on didactics and media education within the blended master’s degree in Media Education, where digital badges are linked to individual actions that students must and can carry out in itinere (the Blackboard platform assigns them automatically the achievement of the objectives recognised) within the course itself, such as watching video lectures, delivering activities, downloading in-depth materials or answering self-assessment tests.
The research question refers to the understanding of the impact of digital badges in student viewing and how this may or may not help support widespread teaching and assessment. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to students with a scale investigating their degree of satisfaction and impressions; further, interviews with a selected sample were conducted to reflect on the effectiveness of badges.
The descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that students strongly argue that badges do not represent a person’s real abilities and they are not satisfied with the characteristics of the implementation of digital badges, in particular badges are not motivating unless teachers emphasise them and they do not represent achievements in terms of skills attained.
This finding partly confirms students’ desire not to see the need for tangible ‘objects’, such as points or badges, in relation to their learning (Alt, 2023), and confirms how these can be supportive but not essential within the process.

PRODUCING DIGITAL ARTIFACTS TO COUNTER “DIGITAL EDUCATION POVERTY” IN THE LOGIC OF THIRD SPACE LEARNING by Stefano PASTA, Michele MARANGI

Since 2021, the Research Centre on Media Education, Innovation and Technology (CREMIT) of the Catholic University has been proposing to use the new construct of “digital educational poverty”, overcoming and expanding the concept of “digital divide”.
Taking the “educational opportunities” of an Area as the basis of the concept of “digital educational poverty”, the term “digital educational poverty” refers to the lack of acquisition of digital skills, understood as a new form of literacy (Rivoltella, 2020) needed in the digital society to analyze the production and the use of different digital contents by the “prosumers”.
This deficiency makes it very difficult for the individual to access the opportunities offered by the digital and infosphere. In terms of defining the paradigm, it should be emphasized that the concept of digital educational poverty is the result of the hybridization of two “digital competence’ reference frameworks”.
One is based on a rights perspective, in line with the European Union’s Digital Competencies 2.1 framework (2017) and 2.2 (2022), associated with «a critical, conscious and responsible use of digital technology for learning, working and participating in society» (Vuorikari, Kluzer, Punie, 2022). It also complements the new EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2021) and the General Comment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child concerning the children in the digital environment (2021), with particular reference to the right to learning, to access to correct information, to privacy, freedom of expression and opinion, to protection and nondiscrimination. This perspective can be found in the idea of “Digital Competence” of Europe’s Digital Decade 2030 (2021) and in previous European digital competence surveys, such as ICILS (2018) and DESI (2019). A different perspective that focuses more on the dynamism and transdisciplinary nature of competences is what Rivoltella (2020) calls New Literacy, stressing how a segmented approach betrays the ‘citizenship vocation’ of digital competence (Buckingham, 2019). From a theoretical standpoint, he reinterprets digital competence on the basis of three dimensions: criticism (semantics, meanings, social and cultural sense), ethics (values, responsibilities, citizenship), aesthetics (codes, languages, narratives), while also relying on the concept of Dynamic Literacies (Potter, McDougall, 2017). In Italy, we can detect this vocation in the five areas that constitute the Digital Civic Education Curriculum of the Ministry of Education (2018); in the international and research arena, we find this approach in the work of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) of Stanford University, in Students’ Civic Online Reasoning (2019) and Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning (2016). Other texts have defined the construct (Pasta, Rivoltella 2022; Pasta 2022), discussed the measurability of the phenomenon (Pasta, Marangi, Rivoltella, 2021), presented the Digital Competence Score (DCS) survey instrument and data from a survey (Marangi, Pasta, Rivoltella, 2022), investigated situations where educational poverty and digital educational poverty do not coincide (Marangi, Pasta, Rivoltella, 2023).
The study analyzes a significant sample of 1400 digital artifacts produced by lower secondary school students from 100 schools, that are the outcomes of the newsrooms (Digital Writing: Wikipedia, Online Petition; Podcast: Review, Investigation; Digital Storytelling; Social Marketing), i.e. third learning spaces (Potter, McDougall, 2017) around which is built the project to combat digital educational poverty.
The artifacts will be analyzed both according to some indicators of the aesthetic, critical and ethical dimensions of digital competence (Rivoltella, 2022) and to the dimensions of the design and the implementation process leading to “onlife citizenship” (Pasta, Rivoltella, 2022).
From the analysis of the artifacts of “Connessioni Digitali”, emerge both the complexity of the concept of digital competence, and the need to equip oneself with multiple methodologies and teaching tools to place the creation of concrete media products and the planning of communication strategies, following some cornerstones:

• cross-media logic and trans-media dynamics, which allow both to cross and experiment with different platforms and to adapt the same concept to different formats, with specific characteristics, rules and styles;
• the creation of third learning spaces, capable of bringing out the theoretical sense of processes and awareness of one’s own skills, starting from laboratory operations, from the collective and collaborative dimension, from people’s social and cultural consumption, in a continuous hybridization not only of the formal sphere with the informal one, but also of educational roles and postures;
• the need to rethink and renew some cornerstones of classical media education, such as the critical spirit, the creative capacity and the productive vocation, in an increasingly post-media and fluid context.

HATE SPEECH ONLINE: DETECTION METHODOLOGIES BETWEEN ALGORITHMIC AND QUALITATIVE EVALUATIONS. A CASE STUDY ON ANTI-SEMITISM ON TWITTER by Stefano PASTA

Research on the forms of contemporary hatred (Siegel, 2020; Santerini, 2021), and in particular studies on the changes that have taken place on the social Web (Pasta, 2018, 2019), agree that this phenomenon requires a multidisciplinary approach.
At an international level, the field of Hate Studies, which combines the legal and IT fields with the humanities (sociological, pedagogical, anthropological, philosophical, linguistic, semiotic) and the interests of scholars, researchers, politicians, communication experts, human rights, NGO leaders, is marked by a significant number of research aimed at automating detection processes and creating an algorithm capable of identifying online hatred. The corpus is almost always taken from Twitter, since among the main social networks it is the only one with easy access to data automatically through APIs, i.e. application programming interfaces.
In this field of research there is a tension between human-non-human and technology-human action, with the tendency to limit interventions to artificial intelligence to the detriment of more interpretative approaches. At the macro level, we can identify two groups among international studies. The first includes searches that use only machine learning methods, while the second includes studies that combine automatic search with human classification (Pasta, 2021; 2023).
The contribution presents an analysis that combines socio-educational approach and automatic computer processing. This methodology is applied to various target groups and aims, alongside detection, at a more in-depth study of its characteristics, in order to design coherent educational interventions. This case deals with the classification of antiSemitic hate speech on Twitter, in Italian from 1st March 2019 to 28th February 2023. The question is whether there are monthly spikes in antiSemitic hatred, and the research is carried out through temporal analyses of samples manually classified by experts, and later is specified which rhetoric and forms of hatred are prevalent.
The methodology used falls under the techniques of social network analysis (SNA). The data were collected using the open-source Python library GetOldTweets3, which allows to obtain tweets via query search. With the search string that combined the presence of a lemma identifying the target group with (AND) a reference to elements typical of antiSemitism according to the literature, all the tweets published in the two years were extracted.
Subsequently, following the technique of simple random sampling without repetition, a sample consisting of 100 tweets per month was selected, thus obtaining a sample dataset of 4800 total posts (Gareth et al., 2017). The latter was manually classified by industry experts (“annotators”), who determined whether the tweet contained hate or not. In case there was a hate content, they assigned the rhetoric and the corresponding form of antiSemitism, according to the Working Definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The former were derived from a psycho-social analysis and historical-literary on linguistic forms of hostility and already tested for other target groups by the same interdisciplinary team (insults, derision/irony, exclusion/separation, prejudice, dehumanization, humiliation/contempt, fear, competition, incitement/violence).
After returning the main results (however the contribution focuses on the methodological approach), the last step is to submit the results to a confusion matrix, i.e. a tool for analyzing the errors made by a machine learning model (Gareth, Witten, Tibshirani, 2017). All the texts classified by the annotators are thus also evaluated by an algorithm capable of establishing whether the tweet contains hate, after applying a series of typical Natural Language Processing (NLP) procedures to “clean” the texts, such as the removal of superfluous characters, the conversion of text to lowercase and the removal of stopwords (Bird, Klein, Loper, 2009). For the “alternative” classification, the dictionary of negative wordsfrom anotherscientific research in Italian is used. It will be highlighted how the algorithm that takes into account only the roots of the words does not perform well in identifying hateful content, with a high degree of difference in the evaluation on the same tweets between the manual annotation process, also called tagging, which requires collaboration with experts, and that is produced by the algorithm created with the dictionary of negative words of another methodology.
From the case study, connected to the debate in the Hate Studies, emerges the need to contextualize the signs (words, images, memes…) in context. The high error rate produced by the algorithm confirms that semantic analysis alone is not sufficient to be able to correctly automate such a complex process. It is necessary to possess a knowledge of reality and therefore of the context in which it is found, as well as reflect on the different means used in the mechanisms of othering, i.e. on a set of dynamics, processes, structures, including linguistic ones, which dialectically group subjects into a “us” and “them” in groups presented as homogeneous and alternative to each other (Powell & Menendian, 2018), and in perspectivation strategies of polarization us vs. them (Graumann, Kallmeyer, 2002).
Algorithmic logic, as Bruner (1996) has shown, deals with already encoded information, the meaning of which is established in advance; computational logic is interested in stimuli and responses, not in the meaning to be attributed to things, processes information, while those who do culture and education interpret and produce meaning: an operation full of ambiguity and above all sensitive to the context. Therefore, from the case study, it emerges that algorithms that limit themselves to identifying insults, or that only detect the presence of hate words, are not enough, while it is necessary to continue experimenting with research that integrates the
two phases of human and automatic classification, applying interdisciplinary approaches and start from an in-depth knowledge of the manifestations of the phenomena at the center of the investigation.