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Social media platforms provide opportunities for users across the world to connect and communicate between them and engage into acts of social support and entertainment. Yet it can also bring negative consequences as it has been associated with poor mental health and life dissatisfaction. This underlines the importance of delivering social media literacy (SML) interventions that raise awareness of the dangers and threats that are hidden within. To this date, SML initiatives have shown their benefits towards the acquisition of SML skills through the forms of school interventions and mini-games. However, studies on promoting SML through social media platforms need to be also encouraged and innovative approaches to provide interactive scenarios with hands-on experiences need to be formulated. Hence, the project COURAGE introduces a new approach towards SML by proposing the integration of educational opportunities within a controlled social media platform. To provide students the opportunity to learn whilst they naturally explore social media we propose the integration of virtual learning companions. In this paper we report seven empirical approaches towards SML skills acquisition powered by virtual learning companions. The paper concludes with a discussion towards the benefits and limitations of using this type of SML interventions.

We present a digital media literacy activity composed of (i) an educational talk and (ii) a game-based activity. The aim is to support teachers in developing learning activities to increase awareness of social media threats among students. Through this activity students directly experience phenomena like echo chambers and filter bubbles that can be provoked by harmful online interaction dynamics controlled by social media platforms’ recommender systems while remaining invisible to the affected users. Our preliminary findings show that a game-based direct experience, inspired by the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, can increase the perception of social media influence on participants with statistically significant results compared to standard lecture-based activity. We conclude that developing a tool enabling educators and scholars to easily perform the proposed activity can be helpful to improve digital media literacy effectiveness.

Social media are offering new opportunities for communication and interaction way beyond what was possible only a few years ago. However, social media are also virtual spaces where young people are exposed to a variety of threats. Digital addiction, discrimination, hate speech, misinformation, polarization as well as manipulative influences of algorithms, body stereotyping, and cyberbullying are examples of challenges that find fertile ground on social media. Educators and students are not adequately prepared to face these challenges. To this aim, the COURAGE project, presented in this paper, introduces new tools and learning methodologies that can be adopted within higher education learning paths to train educators to deal with social media threats. The overarching principles of the COURAGE project leverage the most recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and in the educational domain paired with social and media psychological insights to support the development of the COURAGE ecosystem. The results of the experiments currently implemented with teachers and students of secondary schools as well as the impact of the COURAGE project on societal changes and ethical questions are presented and discussed.

The provision of toxic content and misinformation is a frequent phenomenon in current social media with specific impact and risks for younger users. We report on efforts taken in the project Courage to mitigate and overcome these threats through dedicated educational technology inspired by psychological and pedagogical approaches. The aim is to empower adolescents to confidently interact with and utilize social media and to increase their awareness and resilience. For this purpose, we have adopted approaches from the field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, namely the provision of a virtual learning companion (VLC). The technical system is a browser-based environment that allows for combining a controllable social media space with a VLC as a plugin. This environment is backed by an API that bundles Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms for detecting and classifying different types of risks. The pedagogical scenarios that are supported by this technical environment and approach range from chat-based dialogues to more complex narrative scripts.

Social media platforms provide opportunities for users across the world to connect and communicate between them and engage into acts of social support and entertainment. Yet it can also bring negative consequences as it has been associated with poor mental health and life dissatisfaction. This underlines the importance of delivering social media literacy (SML) interventions that raise awareness of the dangers and threats that are hidden within. To this date, SML initiatives have shown their benefits towards the acquisition of SML skills through the forms of school interventions and mini-games. However, studies on promoting SML through social media platforms need to be also encouraged and innovative approaches to provide interactive scenarios with hands-on experiences need to be formulated. Hence, the project COURAGE introduces a new approach towards SML by proposing the integration of educational opportunities within a controlled social media platform. To provide students the opportunity to learn whilst they naturally explore social media we propose the integration of virtual learning companions. In this paper we report seven empirical approaches towards SML skills acquisition powered by virtual learning companions. The paper concludes with a discussion towards the benefits and limitations of using this type of SML interventions.