About

What is the DCRP and who hosts it?

The Digital Citizenship+ (Plus) Resource Platform (DCPR) (previously called the Digital Literacy Resource Platform (DLRP)) is an evolving collection of learning experiences, visualizations, and other educational resources (collectively referred to as “tools”) designed and maintained by the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. You can you use the DCRP to learn about different areas of youth’s (ages 11-18) digitally connected life, including:

(1) Artificial Intelligence (AI), (2) Civic and Political Engagement, (3) Computational Thinking, (4) Content Production, (5) Context, (6) Data, (7) Digital Access, (8) Digital Economy, (9) Digital (Literacy), (10) Identity Exploration and Formation, (11) Information Quality, (12) Law, (13) Media (Literacy), (14) Positive/Respectful Behavior, (15) Privacy and Reputation, (16) Safety and Well-being, and (17) Security.

These tools aim to empower you with knowledge about connected learning environments and other parts of the digital world so you can make the choices that are right for you. If you are responsible for educating others, these tools can also support you as you teach, parent, or fill other valuable guidance roles. Our goal is to promote the co-creation of trustworthy and supportive digital spaces for all of us. For more information check out our team's Medium post.

How are the tools on the DCRP licensed?

All tools made available on the DCRP are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license unless otherwise specified. You can make use of them, including copying and preparing derivative works, whether commercial or non-commercial, so long as you attribute Youth and Media as the original source and follow the other terms of the license, like sharing any further works under the same terms. Furthermore, we would be delighted to learn more about how you think our tools could be adapted, remixed, and built upon, so if you have ideas or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Who are these tools meant for?

Anyone! There is something here for everyone, including educators, librarians, school administrators, parents/caregivers, and youth. Even if a resource is labeled for a different audience, go ahead and try it out if it looks interesting to you! The digital world is dynamic, and these tools are designed to be as well.

What tools are available?

A lot! The DCRP currently hosts tools that explore fourteen areas of youth life. Within each area, our tools address a range of issues, using different formats to do so. More areas and tools will be added over time.

A particular emphasis of Youth and Media has been to produce learning experiences — in collaboration with youth and youth-serving organizations — that enable people to learn (as individuals or as part of a group) about a specific issue. The learning experiences include step-by-step guidance on how to fully engage in the different activities. Furthermore, some learning experiences include additional resources that educators and participants can incorporate into the learning experience or review before or after as supporting material. You are welcome to adapt each learning experience by removing or adding resources based on your own needs and interests.

Who created the tools and what has been the design process?

Most of the tools on the DCRP, if not otherwise noted, have been co-designed and created by the Youth and Media team, together with youth. They have been reviewed along the way by internal and external experts; Youth Advisors, summer interns, and research assistants, and field-tested within formal and informal learning spaces.

Many tools have also benefited from collaborations with different institutions. For instance, the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School helped us producing learning experiences around topics such as parody, the public domain, and Creative Commons licenses. Together with four youth-serving organizations in the greater Boston area (NuVu Studio, Phillips Academy Andover, Transformative Culture Project, and Zumix Radio), we co-designed learning experiences around identity formation, creative expression, drivers for youth in the context of the digital economy environment (i.e., youth practices, motivations, skills, pathways, and value creation), as well as civic and political engagement. Currently, our team is working with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy to develop learning experiences around information quality and news literacy. In all these cases, the editorial responsibility remains with the Youth and Media team.

Who funded the DCRP and the different tools?

The DCRP as a platform was created by the Youth and Media team with financial support from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media Literacy Trust Challenge Competition and contributions by the Berkman Klein Center’s Governance and Ethics of AI Initiative, funded by the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund.

All tools on the DCRP have been developed between 2011 and 2017 by the Youth and Media team (unless acknowledged otherwise) with support from the McCormick Foundation, The National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media Literacy Trust Challenge Competition, the Digital Media and Learning (DML) grant, and by the Berkman Klein Center’s Governance and Ethics of AI Initiative, funded by the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund.

In 2017, Youth and Media received a gift from Facebook, Inc. to make 18 existing learning experiences more culturally interoperable and ready for translation into over 35 languages. In this process, we have made the learning experiences more platform-agnostic given that young people’s social media habits vary across geographies and contexts.

In which languages are the tools available?

We invite you to explore our collection of resources by going to the DCRP home page and using the filter menu to find the tools that best fit your needs and interests. All tools are available in English. A subset of tools is now available in over 35 languages, with more translated content to be added over time! These languages include

(1) Amharic, (2) Arabic, (3) Bahasa Indonesian, (4) Chinese (Taiwan), (5) Chinese (Traditional), (6) Czech, (7) Danish, (8) Dutch, (9) Estonian, (10) French, (11) German, (12) Greek, (13) Hausa, (14) Hebrew, (15) Hungarian, (16) Italian, (17) Japanese, (18) Korean, (19) Latvian, (20) Lithuanian, (21) Norweigan, (22) Polish, (23) Portugese (LatAm), (24) Portugese (Portugal), (25) Russian, (26) Shona, (27) Spanish (LatAm), (28) Spanish (Spain), (29) Swahili, (30) Swedish, (31) Tagalog, (32) Thai, (33) Turkish, (34) Ukranian, (35) Urdu, (36) Vietnamese, and (37) Zulu. 

Please note that the PDFs of the translated tools do not include the content under the "Resources" heading in the English version of the PDF. To view these Resources, please visit the English PDF of the tool. To view Resources across many of our tools, please visit our "External Resources" page. 

What can I use the tools for?

Anything! DCRP tools are here for you to play with and explore. We have designed and created the tools to make it as easy as possible to integrate them into a curriculum. We have outlined time requirements and provided educators with written prompts to follow along the way.  The tools can be used either collectively or individually and can be incorporated into after-school programs or used at home. Also, if you have “outside the box” ways of using these tools on the DCRP, go for it (see above for the terms of the relevant Creative Commons license)!

Can you give me an example of how I could integrate a learning experience into my classroom?

The learning experiences can be integrated across the school curriculum. Here are a few helpful examples for the following five subject areas: History, English, Science, Math, and World Language. 

History

  • Civic and Political Engagement → Make a comparison between a historical social movement and a more recent one. How did people communicate with each other within the movement? How were the movements covered in the media? As part of this exercise, you could introduce students to the "Hashtags" learning experience.

English

  • Security → Have students write persuasive essays on a security-related topic. An example could include students arguing for or against connecting personal devices to the school Wi-Fi network. In the process, students will likely interact with technical texts. One of their goals will be to make this information understandable to a general audience. As part of this activity, you could introduce students to the "Public Wi-Fi" learning experience.
  • Identity Exploration and Formation → Have students create a social media profile (real or fake) for characters in a literary text the class is reading. Ask students to choose the profile picture, handle or username, “About Me” section, friends list, and a few sample posts and/or images the character would share. Have students consider what the character shares publicly and what you, the reader, know only because of the narrator’s analysis. Consider having multiple students create a profile for the same character and then have the class compare and contrast each of the profiles created. Why did the students make the decisions they made about what to include in the profile they created? Does each profile accurately represent what we know from the text? Why or why not? As part of this activity, you could introduce students to the "Online Presence" learning experience.

Science

  • Digital Economy → Online media that teaches about various scientific concepts has grown popular, as YouTubers, bloggers, and personalities like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson utilize digital communication tools to build an online brand that makes complex scientific ideas accessible to a mass audience. With your students, identify how these popular science online content creators establish trust with their audience, how they cite scientific information, and the different strategies they use to make their content entertaining for their audience. Discuss the skills students think are involved in developing this content (e.g., research, creative thinking, media production). Using these best practices, have your students create content for a popular science YouTube channel, webpage, or blog, and have them reflect on some of the skills they developed in this process. Discuss the differences in preparing content for a science-professional audience vs. a general population audience. As part of this activity, you could introduce students to the "Identifying Our Strengths" learning experience.

Math

  • Information Quality  → Identify a news story that presents a mathematical concept in an unclear way. A good example of this is a misleading statistic. Have participants identify the source of the statistic (e.g., from what research article is the statistic from?). Do they see the statistic presented in other news stories? If so, encourage students to make a timeline of the sources where this statistic appeared. Discuss: across the different sources, what potentially motivated the use of the statistic? What is the impact (potential or actual) of including such a statistic in the story / stories? As part of this activity, you could introduce students to the "Beyond the Original" learning experience.  

World Language

  • Civic and Political Engagement → Have students choose an advocacy issue they are passionate about. Encourage them to find memes around this issue in the target language. Discuss with students: what conventions are utilized that are the same/different from the meme culture aligned with your local/regional context? Are the same images used to create memes in the target language? Based on the conventions they noticed, encourage them to create their own meme in the target language and brainstorm ways they might spread their media messages online to increase visibility around the cause. As part of this activity, you could introduce students to the "Raising Awareness Through Media" learning experience. 

What would an interesting grouping of learning experience activities look like?

Our learning experiences and other educational tools can be mixed and matched in countless ways. Just as examples, imagine the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1. You are an organization whose mission is to reverse the increasing gender digital divide and empower women and girls in acquiring skills that will help them become both ICT users and creators in the digital world. You have an afternoon to work with a group of young women — some of the themes you want to work on may be: reflecting upon one’s social media habits; how other people may perceive what we post and how they may feel about it; how this group of young women can present themselves differently online to different people, and how they can feel more empowered to tackle the changes that they want to see in the future concerning an issue in their communities. Here is a grouping of different activities that could possibly be interesting:

Scenario 2. You are working on a project that harnesses the power of creative arts for youth and community development. Once a week, you work closely with young artists and cultural creatives as they use their creativity to bring the community together for dialogue and action. Here is a grouping of different activities that you might find helpful to engage in with the youth you mentor to show how various types of media can be used to promote awareness around an issue:

How can I help?

All hands on deck! You can search by thematic area, year, language, medium, etc. to find relevant resources and create your own custom lesson plans. We hope that our list stays mindful of cultural differences and contexts and reaches young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, and educational levels around the world. If you know of any great resources in your local language that you would like to recommend for this list, please contact us at youthandmedia@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

More questions and/or ideas?

We greatly welcome feedback from all DCRP users. Are these tools helpful to you — why or why not? For what purpose(s) are you using them? Are there other areas of the digital world for which you’d like to see tools developed? Want to work with us to get those tools up and running? Please let us know at youthandmedia@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

For other questions or press requests, please email Youth and Media Director Sandra Cortesi at scortesi@cyber.law.harvard.edu.