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In this report, the main findings of work package 5 ‘ICT in education’ in the five countries Estonia, Germany, Greece, Norway, and Romania are presented, exploring how children and young people regard their education in terms of preparing them for future life in the digital age. The findings are not only reported on the perspectives of children and young people but are also enriched by results from interviews with teachers and national stakeholders. This report is thus intended to provide broad insights

Children and young people are often labelled the “digital generation”, naturally equipped with the skills to reap the benefits of digitised education, working life and communication through social media now and in the future. However, this age group’s use of information and communication technology (ICT) is not uniform, nor are the outcomes of their adaption to ICT. Shaped by their social environment and socioeconomic conditions, the potential benefits of children’s and young people’s ICT use may vary greatly, contributing to increased inequalities that exacerbate vulnerability for some while promoting health and well-being for others. This paper presents a protocol for conceptualising, systematically identifying and synthesising the literature on which conditions contribute to children and young people being negatively or positively impacted by their use of ICT. Here, children and young people are seen as social actors in four domains of their everyday lives illustrated through the digital ecosystem: family, leisure, education and civic participation. This protocol’s overview of the actors’ navigation within and across the different domains and potential for studying the interactions between the different spheres of the ecosystem may advance the understanding of both the risks and benefits facing children and young people in their digital lives.

Τhis report presents the major findings from work package 4 focusing on the area concerning digital technology as it relates to the leisure time of children and young people. The aim is to understand the interplay between leisure and socialisation among children and young people, as presented through ICT use in everyday life. The findings from this study explore the ways in which ICT is an integral part of children’s social everyday life. Children and young people’s everyday leisure practices are transformed through ICT usage, exploring the potential benefits of ICT in leisure as well as the harmful elements. This study also provides insights on intergenerational communication. Comprehensive tools were developed to understand the fusion of digital and material spaces in the everyday interactions of children and young people. These tools are Nettskjema bilde (an App developed by the team to collect data with and from children) and KG-Notes. Different methodologies were applied: interviews, game observations and online diaries. The main findings of the research conducted within this work package aresummarised as follows: Questions of inequality in terms of access and connectivity were mostly raised by participants in Romania, where some children, especially those from rural or low-income families, who seem to share some of their devices with their siblings. Sharing devices was also reported in other countries, especially among younger children. Smartphones seem to be the most important device for children and young people, around which digital capital revolves, the age of acquiring one’s first smartphone is considered a kind of a milestone. Communication with friends is through digital media. Children communicate with their friends every day through chatting or calling, using different apps, where the reasons range from practical reasons, such as exchanging information about the school or doing homework together, arranging meetings, to social reasons. Games are a significant part of all children’s lives among the five countries participating in our research. Playing online games with strangers is generally experienced as different from playing with friends. There appears to be an agreement on how to behave while playing with strangers: communication while playing is reduced compared to when playing with friends, and the content of that communication is restricted to non-personal information. Online activities, including gaming, have a strong element of socialisation. Maintenance of friendships, particularly during lockdowns, was made possible thanks to digital media Ultimately, screen time seems to be an issue for (almost) all families in (almost) all countries. In Norway, however, screen time is less of an issue, as the parents accept it as a way of being social and spending leisure time, while the children report having a perceived entitlement to screen time if they fulfil other obligations, such as schoolwork and participation in other leisure activities. In most cases, children describe specific rules, such as no games or content for people above 18 years, not spending too much money on gaming, no cell phone on the table, no cell phone right before going to sleep or right after waking up etc., as well as different amount of screen time according to schooldays and weekends. Another crucial point is parents’ monitoring of children’s online activities. The impact of the pandemic meant that the children and young people had to stay all day in their homes and occupy themselves mainly with ICT instead of getting out to see their friends. ICT was an important social arena.

This report showcases co-researching with twelve young people between the ages of 15-18, using the technique of digital storytelling workshops conducted between September 2021 and January 2022 in Estonia, Greece and the United Kingdom: The aim was to compare the visual, discursive content produced by the participants and their interactions, on the topic of what inspires and challenges their civic participation when they use digital technologies.

This paper presents a description of the innovative method of video workshops used in the DigiGen project and its implementation in the field of ICT in education in five European countries. This method aims at investigating children’s and young people’s reflections and perceptions on education preparing them for life in the digital age in Estonia, Germany, Greece, Norway, and Romania. Drawing on the collaborative ethnography approach followed in the DigiGen project, one important aspect of the video workshops is the participation of children and young people - together with teacher candidates - as co-researchers and experts. However, this paper is primarily intended to provide insights into the implementation of the video workshop method in these five countries and some initial implications that result from this.

The DigiGen project address the impact of technological transformations on the Digital Generation – of children’s and young people’s everyday lives focusing on the domains of home (family), their leisure time, education, and their civic participation. Our goal has been to uncover both the harmful and beneficial effects of digitalization on children and young people’s skills and competence, wellbeing, involvement in bullying/harassment, level of trust and processes of democratization. This is achieved through uncovering in what ways children and young people use digital technology and with whom they interact, in what ways digital technology is meaningful to them and how digital technology may be seen as enabling or disabling their wants and needs. For this purpose, the project has developed a conceptual model to understand children’s and young people’s shaping of digital technology within and across the domains of their everyday lives, labelling these domains the digital ecosystems. The model considers the vulnerability and risks that the younger generation face but also the competence-building, skill-enhancing creativity brought forth by their own initiative and agency. Through the active involvement of children and young people, the project has been designed to generate insights that have the potential to impact upon developing effective policies and practices across Europe. Furthermore, the inclusion of children and young people as co-researchers has allowed us to uncover what is meaningful to them when using digital technology and what is less meaningful. This working paper builds on extensive qualitative data collected in 2020-2022 through individual interviews, focus group interviews and observation from 588 children and young people aged 5 to 18 in eight European countries, in addition to secondary analyses of existing databases on European children’s and young people’s well-being highlighted through their use of digital technology. Also, parents,teachers and other stakeholders have been interviewed. The analyses of qualitative data in this report have been prepared by scoping reviews of existing literature within each of the four domains. Following three years of research on the impact of digital transformations on children and youth, DigiGen has developed recommendations for policy and practice, acknowledging the need for proper governance distribution to support children in the digital era: through regulation, industry self-regulation, and civil society’s awareness raising.

This working paper presents results of the exploratory Pilot Study COVID-19 Add-On, where interviews with children and young people were conducted between November 2020 and February 2021 in Estonia, Germany, Greece, Norway and Romania, investigating and comparing how children and young people in different countries experience and reflect the use of ICT in education during the COVID-19 pandemic. &nbsp

This report showcases netnographic research (online observation, content and 65 interviews in total) conducted between September 2020 and April 2021 in Estonia, Greece and the United Kingdom, comparing the reasons and the means by which youth engaged in online civic participation, focusing on online movements mobilising for racial, social and environmental justice.

This working paper presents results of the exploratory Pilot Study COVID-19 Add-On, where interviews with children and young people were conducted between November 2020 andFebruary 2021 in Estonia, Germany, Greece, Norway and Romania, investigating and comparing how children and young people in different countries experience and reflect the use of ICT in education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This deliverable (Working Paper) consists of two main parts. First, we provide a literature review on the four main areas within DigiGen: family life, leisure time, education and civic participation. The review demonstrates the existing diversity of research on the relationship between digital technology and individual family members as well as the family system. This review also examines parental involvement and the negotiations in which parents and children are engaged in order to arrange the ways and the amount of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use during children’s leisure time, the risk areas and the most common digital practices. Furthermore, it contains the current state of research regarding ICT in/and education while considering the availability of ICT in schools, the actual use of ICT in schools, the computer and information literacy competencies of students and teachers’ experiences with ICT, among other aspects. Finally, we also refer to civic participation and political engagement of young people with the aim to understand the context within which the political behaviour of young people is manifested online and to assess the extent to which it affects offline political practices. Second, we provide an overview of existing databases in relation to ICT and the extent to which such data allows the analysis of at-risk groups among children and youth. The section is divided into two main parts by which the first one reviews existing databases at the international level and the second one covers national databases in the Consortium countries. Each database is presented in a table that contains general information about the database and about the ICT indicators that contains, whether certain at-risk groups can be identified in that given database and our subjective evaluation regarding the strengths and weaknesses of each database. When possible, we also comment on the potential improvement of the database for future analyses. Finally, the last section contains some concluding remarks that intend to summarize the information provided as well as the main strengths and weaknesses of current data for empirical research. Most importantly, we also identify the information lacking in current surveys and provide concrete recommendations for the improvement of the existing data that could enrich future analyses. EU-Horizon 2020 project 870548

Episodes of unemployment or deskilling work can signal low ability to employers and impede individuals’ employment chances. In this chapter we analyse how the scarring effects of experiences of job insecurity vary across countries. We presented fictitious CVs integrated in an online survey to 1920 respondents recruiting for real jobs in five occupational fields in Bulgaria, Greece, Norway and Switzerland. Our findings show that unemployment scarring is strongest in Norway, followed by Switzerland, and is weaker in Bulgaria and Greece. Work experience in deskilling jobs as well as frequent changes of jobs (job-hopping) are also found to decrease applicants’ chances. We interpret our findings with regard to different national economies (youth unemployment), employment protection legislation and education systems, arguing that these country-specific settings shape recruiters’ perceptions of individuals’ precarious job experience, which in turn influences their hiring decisions.

In order to investigate the scarring effect of early job insecurity on future employment chances we have implemented a factorial survey experiment with recruiters based on real vacancies in Bulgaria, Greece, Norway and Switzerland. We contribute to recruitment research at least in three ways: First, the multinational design allows us to run comparative analysis across countries, which are carried out along the national dimensions youth unemployment rate, employment protection regulation and type of educational system. Second, we differentiate between two different forms of early job insecurity – unemployment and work experience in deskilling jobs, and we demonstrate that the sole focus on unemployment, as it is the case in the prevalent labour market research, is not sufficient in order to fully understand labour market outcomes caused by different forms of job insecurities. Third, since our sample consists of real recruiters who were hiring for current jobs at the time when the study was carried out, we provide a unique cross-country data set of high external validity. Our findings suggest that scarring effects of early job insecurity vary across countries and across occupational fields, and while scarring caused by work experience in deskilling jobs seems to be enforced by strong employment protection regulations, unemployment scarring seems to stronger where national unemployment is low. Further, the differences in recruiter’s evaluation across occupational fields indicate that signalling value of education may vary depending on specific sectors. Not at least, we contribute to debates around active labour market policies, arguing that measures aiming at quick labour market reintegration without consideration of job quality may not be the most sustainable solution, as work experience in a deskilling job does not lead to better recruiter’s evaluation.

Job insecurity has been gaining research and policy attention throughout the two last decades. However, its definition and conceptualisation remain open questions within the relevant literature. When it comes to measuring early job insecurity and patterns of school-to-work transition, several methodological approaches have been proposed. Methods and variables largely depend on existing data sources. National databases have been developed in a significantly uneven way hindering comparability between different countries. Despite the existence of internationally comparable datasets that cover the EU and EEA countries, these datasets are characterised by specific limitations and constraints that render the detection of comparable transition patterns a difficult yet extremely challenging task. Early job insecurity in Europe: Mapping diversity and the impact of the economic crisis - NEGOTIATE WP3

Le terme multiculturalisme est d’usage fréquent dans quantité de milieux sociaux et intellectuels : on le rencontre dans l’enseignement supérieur, dans les médias, dans les débats politiques et scientifiques de presque tous les pays occidentaux. Selon Bourdieu et Wacquant, il est un de ces concepts qui constituent « la nouvelle vulgate planétaire » récurrente chez les intellectuels des pays occidentaux : « Dans tous les pays avancés, patrons et hauts fonctionnaires internationaux, intellectue...