Education Commons^™

Networking Young Citizens: Learning To Be Citizens In And With The Social Web, Suzanne Mellor, Terri Seddon

Suzanne Mellor

Many claims are made in the popular press and in professional education literature about the potential role of the social web for increasing the active civic engagement of young citizens, by either using it as a source of information or as a participatory tool. Empirical evidence supporting such claims is sparse and contested. Moreover, the impact of a young person’s general learning experience, especially that involving Web2, is rarely considered in terms of young people’s likely or actual active civic engagement. The Australian pilot research project Networking Young Citizens, supported by Monash University, examined the ways in which Web2 was …