Promoting critical digital attitudes in students

The dawn of the Internet provided a space for the expansion of access to information with an enormous impact on new forms of expression and citizen participation (Castells, 2001). Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, social networks appeared as an environment to promote prosocial behavior and emancipation, which would be intrinsically related to learning networks and networked learning (De Haro, 2010; Díaz Gandasegui, 2011). Navigation and interaction through mobile technologies (cell phones and tablets) also appeared. This new form of ubiquitous interaction, which is evolving at a dizzying speed, generated another technological phenomenon, which is portable cyberspace, which travels with us and expands our cognition, emotions and interaction with the outside world easily and immediately. During this technological evolution, there was a prevailing view that connected the technology of participatory and creative cultures (Jenkins, 2008). Albeit very veiled, in the 1990s there was already talk of certain risks of exposure and the need to use netiquette to communicate on the web (Pautrat, 2014). But the opening up of cyberspace, and in particular the immediacy of social networks, has led us to see a number of problems of medium to very high social impact. Some of these phenomena Editorial UOC Manual for the improvement of online teaching are cyberbullying, early screen addiction and the current problem of datification or the use (and abuse) of data extracted through the continuous tracing of data based on the millions of operations carried out by users of digital technologies, mobiles, the smart city, etc. In addition to this, the ubiquity and ease of use of mobile phones, which is experienced as a highly positive element for digital participation and creativity, also brings to light serious implications on the psycho-physical health of users, even more so if the user is a child or a young student. Undoubtedly, the recent health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated containment measures have placed an unprecedented level of pressure on the education system and its actors to move to an unprecedented level of emergency non-face-to-face didactics. Indeed, the exacerbation of negative aspects of technological mediation in communication and participation in educational contexts has been noted (Bozkurt et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, there is a great need today to develop a critical digital attitude that allows us to understand the positive and negative implications of technologies in order to overcome the social distance beyond the emergency. In this chapter we are going to review the levels of development of the critical digital attitude, from the identification of the elements that make it up to the teaching strategies to develop this attitude.