Young children and the use of digital technology across Europe

Children are often more digitally skilled than parents realise and learn both from observing other family members and from developing their own strategies. Yet parental attitudes still deeply influence children’s levels of digital literacy and parents tend to have a more positive view of digital technology if schools meaningfully integrate such technologies into children’s learning. These are some of the findings from a major Europe-wide European Commission study of children’s media practices presented here, during Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2018, by Stéphane Chaudron and Rosanna Di Gioia. Stéphane researches young digital citizens’ security and safety at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) and Rosanna is a researcher in the JRC Cyber and Digital Citizens’ Security Unit. [Header image credit: M. Stewart, CC BY-SA 2.0.jpg

Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology - A qualitative study across Europe

It only takes witnessing a few interactions within modern western families to realize how much the experience of childhood has changed. The change comes from different winds blowing on today’s families’ time but certainly, the use of digital technologies peaks out and its impacts on childhood, education, learning and safety has been at question over the last years. Since a very early age, video watching and gaming on a variety of internet-connected devices are among children's favourite activities. Parents see digital technologies as positive and unavoidable, if not necessary, but at the same time, find managing their use challenging. They perceive digital technologies as something that needs to be carefully regulated and controlled. They would appreciate advice on fostering children’s online skills and safety. The document reports on results of a cross-national analysis building on data coming from 234 family interviews with both children and parents, carried out from September 2014 until April 2017 in 21 countries. It exposes the key findings regarding first children’s usage, perceptions of the digital technologies and their digital skills in the home context but also on parents’ perceptions, attitudes, and strategies. Beside the cross-national analysis, a dedicated section provides contextualized snapshots of the study results at national level. It then takes a close up on 38 families in seven countries in which researchers came for a second interview distant of one year in which they focused on monitoring change of context, children and parents’ perceptions, attitudes, and strategies over time. Conclusion reflect on the potential benefits, risks and consequences associated with their (online) interactions with digital technologies and provide recommendations to policymakers, industry, parents and carers.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Fighting child sexual abuse: prevention policies for offenders.

Sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children constitute major violation of fundamental rights and in particular of children rights to protection and care necessary for their well-being, as it is stated in the UNHCR Convention on the Rights of the Child. A series of Union initiatives and in particular Directive 2011/93/EU on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography aim at supporting actively and on a coordinated way the implementation of prevention and repression policies. The aim of this research is to first map existing prevention programmes in the European Union and at International level, focusing on interventions and treatments for (potential) offenders before any abuse occurs, for convicted offenders in prisons, and for convicted offenders after they leave the prison to fights against recidivism. Preventing campaigns and programs, helplines, circles of aids in the International and European landscape are listed and referenced. The effectiveness of those approaches have not yet be fully demonstrated and presented. Nevertheless, the report also offers preliminary evaluations of the reported initiatives and highlights on the possible best practices. In addition, criteria for more thorough assessment are suggested. Those prevention programmes shall be considered as an important contribution for a resilient and effective approach to fight against child sexual exploitation both in the cyberspace and offline, and to raise main stakeholders’ awareness to the issueJRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Cyber safety game and tools made of citizen’s engagement

Happy Onlife is a game and a toolkit targeting teens to develop digital safety and security skills and knowledge. The Happy Onlife toolkit has been made of citizens’ engagement in its entire life-cycle. In the frame of the Citizens Engagement Festival held on 23-24 October, 2018 at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) at the Ispra site. JRC E3 was asked to produce a 3-minute video of the Happy Onlife selected project of engagement. This video shows three main phases of citizens’ engagement that can be summarised as follows: (1) Phase 1 – Concept & Development of the Happy Onlife tools; (2) Phase 2 – The Happy Onlife toolkit as paper-box, digital game as App and Web version; (3) Phase 3 Adoption citizens and future valorization. To document the citizens’ engagement in the entire life-cycle of the project, each phase is firstly introduced by a brief description and then illustrated by pictures linked to word-tags. The aim of this video creation was to showcase how citizen engagement can change knowledge production and development of tools within the policy cycle as alternative to the traditional methods.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Attitudes towards cyber risks - Implicit & self-report measures. The Happy Onlife edutainment experience of secondary school children

The Happy Onlife experience has contributed to children’s right to be heard in matters affecting them in their digital interactions and lives. Happy Onlife has been considered as effective awareness raising and learning tool regarding cyber security issues by its end-users, namely students, teachers, parents and educators. By playing with Happy Onlife game, children could naturally self-disclose and express their emotions, needs, understanding and sometimes worries and doubts. Indeed, self-reporting provides valuable insights for a wide range of research, policy and educational questions, however it can be susceptible to self-presentation and socially desirable responding. To overcome these limitations, implicit measures were considered to complement experimental research about children’s attitude towards cyber risks. The work described in this document aims at evaluating the effect of the Happy Onlife tool on attitudes towards cyber risk of children aged 10-12, from Time T1 to Time T2, before and after using Happy Onlife edutainment. The first research aim is to test the Happy Onlife edutainment reliability as a learning tool for enhancing digital competences with a focus on cyber security, data protection, privacy, online communication, netiquette and digital identity management. Moreover, a second purpose is the contribution to the development and validation of a new implicit measure of cyber risk propensity for children (10-12 years old). A third aim is to investigate the relationship between implicit risk attitudes and explicit risk-taking behaviour. In this pilot research all explicit and implicit measures showed adequate reliability. There was a significant effect pre and post Happy Onlife gaming experience. Current results suggest that the Cyber Security Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a reliable and valid method and may be a useful tool to be added to self-report batteries for cyber risk propensity assessment in children. The Cyber Security Implicit Association Test could be considered for future and wider research on risk-taking behaviour by citizens of all ages. The experiment protocol can be improved, however this contribution could be taken into consideration for the study and implementation of European cyber security strategies and policies to limit online threats and risks.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Privacy safeguards and online anonymity

In a world that is increasingly more connected, digital citizens, actively or passively accept to transmit information, part of which are “personal data”. This information is often collected and elaborated by third parties to infer further knowledge about users. The act of gathering the data is commonly called “tracking” and can be performed through several means. The act of analysing and processing those data and relate them to the individual is called “profiling”. The aim of this JRC Technical report is to be an instrument of support for the Digital Citizens to help them to protect and to manage their privacy during online activities. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, the following chapter is dedicated to the description of two legitimate use-cases to track and profile users on-line, namely target advertising and personalisation of the user experience. Chapter 3 and 4 identify and analyse the set of techniques currently used by online digital providers to track citizens and profile them based on their online behaviour. Chapter 5 deals with some of the available tools cited in chapter 6 that could be helpful to protect the privacy while browsing online. Chapter 6 aims to raise awareness among users and provide some guidelines to address specific issues related to privacy through a multidisciplinary approach. The report concludes highlighting the importance of raising awareness among digital users and empower them through education, technical and legal tools, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to overcome possible privacy issues.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Blockchain in Energy Communities, A proof of concept

This report aims at exploring the use of the distributed ledger paradigm to incentive the participation of the citizen to a truly free, open and interoperable energy market, producing a feasibility study and a first demo testbed, taking also into consideration privacy, cybersecurity and big-data issues of the smart-home in the Energy market context. This study is intended to support point 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of the DSM (COM(2015)192) and point 2.2 of the Energy Union package (COM(2015)80.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Cyber Chronix - Episode 1 - Finding Data

Cyber Chronix is a game raising awareness on privacy risks and data protection rights in the new European General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR). The GDPR applies as of 25 May 2018 and it aims to better protect the privacy and personal data of citizens. But what does it mean for your every day life? Join Lizard and his friends in this adventure and discover it! From our previous work with the Happy Onlife toolkit, it emerged that the versatility of the toolkit in its paper and digital versions is an added value to the learning and citizen engagement process. To meet paper-oriented gamer’s needs, in addition to the Cyber Chronix digital version, we developed a comic strip version . The choice of a traditional comic-booklet aim at supporting users less familiar with digital technologies and those schools and communities not equipped with digital infrastructures. While enhancing the knowledge sharing and facilitating adult mediation, adults can enter into the game-story and feel confident straight away, at the same level as the children. The comic strip is now available in English and it will be soon available in other languages. Italian and French translations are ready, other languages (e.g. Greek, Portogues, Romanian, Spanish) are also foreseen.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

How families handled emergency remote schooling during the Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020: Summary of key findings from families with children in 11 European countries

How did families handle remote schooling during the time of Covid-19 lockdown during spring 2020? Perceptions on remote schooling activities were gathered from parents and their children at the end of primary education and in secondary education (10-18 years old) from 9 EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain) in addition to Switzerland and Norway. The findings show that almost all children who participated in the survey were able to conduct some school-related activities using digital technologies, and many reported that their schools had provided them with both digital communication and learning platforms. The findings also point out to large variations in terms of how children were able to interact with their teachers in learning activities and how often children were in contact with their teachers through online means. In addition to learning activities provided by the school, parents also engaged in complementary learning activities with their children, for example by using free of charge online learning material and exercises, such as video recordings and online quizzes. Both children and parents were worried about the pandemic’s negative impact on education, generally parents more so than children. Families voiced the need for better guidelines on how to support children with distance education activities and how to support the child psychologically during the confinement. Parents also expressed their need for more counselling and psychological support. These early results from the survey can guide future activities of schools and education systems in their move to digital education that can deliver more even, and better, pedagogical and social outcomes. They can also guide planning of practices that suite local context and needs. More in-depth analysis of this data will be made available throughout 2020-2021.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen