On the use of Internet in promoting social virtues. Case study: Civic Parliament

Citizen participation is essential for democracies to be viable, sustainable and healthy. But it is necessary to establish the appropriate channels for exercising it; and we can not fail to consider the fact that people live in an increasingly interconnected society, where the mass media are a key social resource and can play an important role in fostering critical thinking and active citizenship (Livingstone, 2004; Buckingham, 2007). We understand that to achieve this, from the field of civic education, digital spaces should be considered as privileged spaces for participation. In this paper we show the initiatives undertaken by the «Civic Parliament» project to provide online teaching materials to the teachers so they can raise in their students certain social virtues. The challenges in this order are diverse, we could highlight two: to promote participatory awareness in students, and to combine the technical, pedagogical and ethical-civic aspects of media use (Gonzálvez, 2012).