Producing digital artifacts to counter “digital education poverty” in the logic of third space learning

Since 2021, the Research Centre on Media Education, Innovation and Technology (Cremit) has been proposing to use the new construct of “digital educational poverty”, overcoming and expanding the concept of “digital divide”. 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, while the other focuses more on the dynamism and transdisciplinary nature of New Literacy, stressing how a segmented approach betrays the “citizenship vocation” of digital competence. The study analyzes a sample of 214 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. They come from the project “Connessioni Digitali”, created by Save the Children together with Cremit and Edi Onlus 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 and to the dimensions of the design and the implementation process leading to “Onlife Citizenship”. 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.