Editorial: New Literacies

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The Coronavirus pandemic, forcing all schools and universities to exclusively activate distance learning (DL), has triggered an unprecedented innovative process. E-learning had remained a niche resource for a few innovators, experts and enthusiasts; but, with the forced DL due to Covid-19, teachers of all levels had to engage in a new form of teaching and in a new didactic paradigm. In this scenario, some criteria can be usefully identified – transmediality, interactivity, active learning and enhancement of experience – capable of guiding the didactic action and directing teachers towards a larger and more effective online teaching. These criteria, tested in an exceptional health situation, can be useful even beyond the emergency phase in view of a radical didactic renewal, even in classes taken live.
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Criteria for distance learning at the time of Coronavirus

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COVID-19 lockdown measures adopted by governments in March 2020 have impacted our society as never happened before. The school system was not an exception. Interventions to allow students for distance learning through the support of ‘old’ (e.g. TV) or ‘new’ media (e.g. digital platforms) have been promoted, involving millions of students and teachers worldwide. This paper presents a study on school leaders and teachers’ perceptions on the school levels of digital readiness through the comparison of their views before and during the lockdown. The participation in the EU project DETECT provided the context for exploring the school levels of digital readiness. Data were collected belonging to two different phases and allowing to investigate teachers’ perceptions in using technologies for remote teaching. The school is living an unprecedent period where dramatic experiences are also disclosing new opportunities. Our study found that school had a strategy before the COVID-19 emergency, but it was too focused on infrastructures’ acquisition, while the development of competences on the side of both teachers and students requires an investment in long-term training, up to the point of reshaping the current teaching practices and also planning for interdisciplinary educational activities addressed to the students.
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Exploring school levels of digital readiness in pandemic time

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Following China, the next severely affected country due to the COVID-19 epidemic was Italy. In consideration of the increasing number of infections, the government via the Ministerial Decree (DPCM) of March 2020 established various restrictive measures for the entire Italian territory, even involving the closure of schools. Hence, for the first time, the Italian school system had to adopt distance learning.
The mixed methods research in this context involves a non-probabilistic sample of 6,384 secondary school teachers answering a questionnaire issued from 5 August to 1 September 2020, and 30 telephone interviews were conducted among those who had made themselves available during the compilation of the questionnaire to be contacted for the qualitative part of the research.
Therefore, the answers collected in the report1 relay what happened in the second quarter of the school year from 2019 to 2020, the period of the first lockdown in Italy, through which we try to particularly understand the didactic activities implemented by teachers, the main decision maker of the choices, the assessment methods, the autonomy of teachers in managing distance learning and the teachers’ training needs.
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Sudden Shift to Distance Learning: Analysis of the Didactic Choices Made by Italian Secondary School Teachers in the First COVID-19 Lockdown

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Media education is a cultural framework that can be applied in different contexts: schools, families, informal educational environments, along with pastoral work. With Pope Francis’ championing, there is an increasing need to bridge pastoral care and the media, which can become new important forms of proximity and open opportunities to connect and assume responsibility towards others. Our aim is to understand how parishes can think of themselves as third spaces. The paper tackles this question through the exploration of the initiative <italic>Aperto per ferie.</italic> The initiative was created to enable professionals to experience the summer camp activities despite the Covid-19 pandemic, finding new ways of aggregation in pastoral youth clubs and taking advantage of digital community meetings. It developed a digital space to promote a unifying experience. With digital technologies, the boundaries of the community are redrawn. The correspondence with the territory (of the parish and the diocese) is no longer pre-determined. A community with porous edges is making its way and is more open and permeable to contributions coming from outside, and perhaps more accessible, even by those who do not frequent parish environments.
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<italic>Aperto per ferie</italic>: third spaces meet pastoral contexts

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With the spread of digital environments that allow the user to design and produce contents, we have asked ourselves whether digital museums can be considered as ‘third spaces’ in which it is possible to exhibit, research, aggregate and re-elaborate, in a shared narrative, materials and experiences coming from different contexts. Conceiving the digital museum as a third space of contamination between formal and informal, presence and distance, real and digital presupposes the rethinking of the functions of the museum itself, capable of connecting both the demands for safeguards and those of accessibility to the cultural heritage, for an access to knowledge that is increasingly open. Starting from these premises, this contribution references the digital museum Museo Officina dell’Educazione (MOdE) as a third space by specifically analysing the digital settings produced by students of the upper secondary schools and by university students.
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Digital environments as third spaces: analyses of simple artefacts in the rooms of the MOdE

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 15 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 15 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 9 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 9 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 8 (2016): Issue 2 (December 2016)

Volume 8 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 7 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Research on Education and Media

 REM - Research on Education and Media is devoted to research on Education and Media in the broadest sense: Media Education, e-Learning, Education Technology, Teaching and Learning with Technologies, Digital Citizenship, Youth Media Consumption. The journal serves the interest of researchers, educators and teachers, and publishes original research works, case studies, systematic reviews, along with editorials and brief reports, covering recent developments in the field. Issues on Education and Media are discussed with the aim to encourage debate and stimulate new research.  Rejection Rate   10%   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 