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Description
Our project is concerned with online vigilance and online monitoring of content for truthtfulness. It is addressed to three primary groups: teenagers, seniors and students studying pedagogy and education. The internet and social media usage is increasingly common, however the EU Kids Online study from 2018 has concluded that the youth is not properly trained at school on how to safely use the medium. Most of the respondents assessed their competences in researching and verifying information as low. The second group, seniors, continue to increase their participation in the online life, but according to the research we have commissioned, they lack knowledge necessary to identify true information and recognize the “fake news” phenomenon. The third group, students of pedagogy and education, has been chosen due to the future role it will play in educating others. We will conduct 30 workshops in high schools and primary schools, 10 workshops for students interested in media education and 10 meetings for seniors. Our participants will come from all over Poland and will be selected through a recruitment process. Our project meetings will be concerned with increasing competences in verifying online content and recognizing trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, we will organize five webinars for teachers, librarians, and educators on how to teach the youth to check and select information online. We will also conduct a six-months educational campaign to combat fake news and promote searching for trustworthy sources of information. Videos, infographics and a mini-textbook will be created as part of the campaign effort. We will also train 20 volunteers on fact-checking and fake news, and we will publish a series of podcasts discussing these issues. Trainees will prepare 300 analyses of speeches by public figures which will be published on demagog.org.pl.
Summary of project results
Buildings and plots of land belonging to public universities occupy large fragments of Polish cities. There are over one million people working or studying there. Unfortunately, Polish universities score very low in the UI GreenMetric World University ranking showing the attitude to ecology among higher educational institutions across the world (in such categories as infrastructure, energy and water consumption, waste sorting and recycling, transport, scope of research and education). Our objective was to introduce changes to the functioning of such facilities in favour of more sustainable management and operations. Such changes as limited production of wastepaper, water conservation or use of renewable energy have major positive impact on the natural environment. We built a coalition of sixty academic organisations for the popularisation of sustainable solutions. Coalition members were supported by a panel of experts in natural resource protection, energy-efficient technologies and proper waste sorting. We organised a training for representatives of member organisations on how to take care of the environment in daily work and how to pursue sustainability goals developed by the UN. We run workshops for selected leaders on how to effectively influence university authorities and on how to submit petitions to institutions responsible for the condition of natural environment. We supported interventional groups that in eleven academic centres advocated for reducing unfavourable impact of their institutions on the environment. We organised for them consultations with experts, lawyers, and NGOs. At the same time, we ongoingly monitored universities'' reactions to petitions submitted by members of our coalitions and to activities taken up by interventional groups.Our monitoring activities resulted in the submission of 203 comments and recommendations to legal acts governing these institutions. We discovered that twenty-one universities did not consider any environmental criteria when organising tenders, and in the structure of eight-eight of them there were no isolated organisational units responsible for the implementation of environmental protection and sustainability tasks. As many as fifty-three of all universities we sent our recommendations to introduced changes or declared their readiness to implement them in the near future.
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