DIGITAS (short for Digital Asylum-Seekers – Media education crash course for parents and grandparents) is a project that arose from the need for a media education-related training action focused on trainers and teachers working with parents and older learners that is NOT confined within the ‘protectionist’ paradigm and aimed at the ‘demystification’ of media. DIGITAS assumes that (multi)media is here to stay, that the advance of digital technologies has contributed to the emergence of new cultural forms, that exclusively require multimodal literacies – and that some cultural practices of youth, ‘born’ into various multimodal literacies at work in an increasingly digital mediascape, offer consistent opportunities for inter-generational and family learning. DIGITAS produces a training course available in the Comenius/Grundtvig Training Database and delivered to adult education trainers and teachers - with online support on a Moodle Virtual Learning Environment.

In the context of an ongoing consolidation of an European policy on media literacy, the impact of the project is seen to contribute to the dismantling of the ‘protectionist’ paradigm, particularly in the area of parent education and learning in later life, while at the same time to draw attention on a neglected concern regarding the acquisition of ‘soft’ skills in relation to the use of ICT and new/digital media.

The project aims at meeting such priorities, while at the same time basing its approach on a paradigm fundamentally different from the protectionist, ‘child (or adult, for that matter) at risk’ still-dominant view. Even if one does not admit that there is such a thing as a ‘digital generation’, childhood today is now permeated, and in a series of respects even defined, by contemporary media – research shows again and again that children and youth spend more time with various media than they do on any other activity except sleeping (David Buckingham). This is the obvious effect of a media-saturated environment that generated new cultural forms, therefore diverse social and cultural practices that require multimodal literacies. A Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies adopted in 2005 by the UK’s National Council of Teachers of English shows that “there are increased cognitive demands on the audience to interpret the intertextuality of communication events that include combinations of print, speech, images, sounds, movement, music, and animation.” Although this refers primarily to digital forms, this increasingly applies to public mediascapes, not only to experiences in front of a PC or TV screen at home. And, while “the ‘definitions’ of multimodal composing may be written by educators, […] they will most likely have first been pioneered by […] young people” (NCTE), this creates tremendous opportunities for inter-generational and family learning.

The objectives of the project therefore are to:

* contribute to the widening of access to fundamental basic skills such as literacy as needed in a contemporary media-saturated environment, as well as basic digital competence, and equipping older adults with skills needed to cope with change;

* support this approach by collating good practice on inter-generational and family learning; and

* train teachers and trainers working with adults, also with online support – through a course developed by the partnership.

The concept underlying such a course would be that the terms of digital natives and digital immigrants inform rather accurately the distinction and the divide induced by the new cultural forms generated by new technologies. While the reality described by Seymour Papert, James Paul Gee, Don Tapscott or Marc Prensky is 'both more prosaic and more complex' (David Buckingham), the new textual landscapes increasingly require multimodal literacies. Such a course will therefore seek to (1) identify and explore patterns of convergence between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, and inherent continuities that mostly fill the assumed gap between them; (2) explain to 'digital asylum-seekers' major characteristics and features of multimodal literacies; and (3) emphasizing and practicing some learning principles embedded in the electronic, online and wireless texts that make up contemporary textual landscapes (such as computer/video games and online communities). 

The course is supported by a trainer’s handbook and a learner’s handbookpublished online and in print, as well as by the present website conceived as a virtual resource centre, and an online e-learning platform.