DIS-PLAY

Social media of today are flourishing with fake news, political propaganda, fabricated / manipulated / sponsored content, deep fakes and other types of disinformation that are still emerging following technological progress. The youth of today live in the world of diverse social media, densely saturated with disinformation. Particularly when consuming information on social media, they require Media Literacy skills to be able to tell what they can trust.

This project aims at pedagogically equipping youth workers with methods and tools for increasing ML skills of youth to ultimately reduce disinformation on social media. These ML skills will include identifying disinformation, its different types and intentions behind it, reacting to social media disinformation responsibly, and reporting it with regards to these being one’s democratic participation and civic duty.

It will last 36 months 01/03/2022 – 29/02/2024

Increased awareness of the power of the social media and their influence on democratic issues;

Provided with a challenging and attractive new way of learning (larp) and fun mobile game.

Improved knowledge to critically assess the information and identify disinformation;

New contacts and network for further support and/or development.

Increased competences to manage a media-saturated environment.

Increased interest in being more active in society;

Increased self-confidence to engage in social activities.

Objectives

Activities

This transnational Training Activity, which took place in Frankfurt in October 2022, plays a crucial role in the development process, pursuing 3 goals:

To train partner youth workers in the project approach (based on the draft of the Project Result 2 - THE GUIDE FOR ORGANISING LARP) and get their initial feedback for further development.

To test the developed larp scenarios with participating in the Training Activity young people from the partner countries in order to demonstrate the youth workers how larp works in practice, as well as to get their and participants’ initial feedback.

To prepare the youth workers for the actual pilot testing activities that they will run further in the project.

Results

TOOLKIT WITH LARP SCENARIOS ON DISINFORMATION

This is the key result of the project, representing the solution that both provides youth workers/trainers with the quality training materials and corresponds to the new Gen Z learning style of today’s young people. The Toolkit will contain 5 larp scenarios on spotting and tackling disinformation on the internet, thereby directly addressing the project’s main goal of increasing capacity of youth workers for fostering young people’s Media Literacy to combat online disinformation. Thanks to the proposed Toolkit, youth workers and trainers will have a powerful resource they need to implement learning activities with young people to increase their ML capacities in order to confront disinformation on social media.

GUIDE FOR YOUTH WORKERS ON ORGANISING DISINFORMATION LARPS

The Guide is intended to establish a bridge between the worlds of popular education and civil and digital societies, providing youth workers and trainers with a turn-key solution for fostering young people’s Media Literacy to combat online disinformation. Specifically, the Guide will support youth educators in setting up courses or study circles on disinformation, containing recommendations both on the format and implementation of such courses / study circles. The guide will introduce youth workers and trainers to the Gen Z learning style, the pedagogical method of larp, and how to run it correctly using the developed larps from R1 – the DIS-PLAY Toolkit as a training material.

DISINFORMATION ROLE-PLAY MOBILE GAME

This Project Result is an animated scenario-based app for a smartphone, which youth workers can use to facilitate practical application of the ML knowledge, acquired by their younger learners within any disinformation on social media course or study circle. In the game, the player will face simulating reality disinformation cases and will have to make the right choice not to lose and proceed with the game scenario.